


istanbul

by Utopiste



Series: istanbul [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Family Feels, Fix-It of Sorts, Healing, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Apocalypse does not happen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2019-11-01 11:12:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 47,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17866190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Utopiste/pseuds/Utopiste
Summary: “Why would you do that?” Vanya asks. “After what I did to you-”“There’s not that many people who can understand how it feels to be raised by Reginald Hargreeves, you know,” Klaus contributes. “If you’re gone too, who are we going to tell our trauma to? A therapist?Ha.Hard pass.”“But I-” Vanya starts to protest, but then Allison’s arms are slung around her shoulders, and she buries her face in her hair, and for a second Ben lets himself hope everything will be alright in the end.(Once again, the Umbrella Academy saves the day - not that the day cares much about it one way or another.)





	1. ben

**Author's Note:**

> i'm seriously obsessed with this show and all of its characters. this is the self-indulgent fic where i make them work on their issues and learn to be a LITTLE less shitty. just a little
> 
> honestly this could work as a one-shot but i'm feeling like maybe making it into a seven-chapters fic with each sibling as the narrator for one chapter? who knows
> 
> you know where the title is from

It might have been Klaus’ idea, but in the end, it’s Allison’s decision, really. Ben often thinks Dad got it all wrong from the start, putting up Luther as their leader, when the others always saw him as too uptight, too well-behaved, daddy’s little boy. Allison though, she was the one everyone listened to, not just because of her power, but because she had this quality about her that made her feel like everyone’s best friend. Then again, maybe it was part of Dad’s plan all along - you never knew with Reginald Hargreeves.

So yes, it is Klaus’ idea, Allison’s decision, and Diego who picks the lock. Ben stands there next to Klaus and provides the entertaining commentary. When the door opens, Klaus whoops and yells, “Teamwork, baby!” before everyone else shushes him.

“What part of stealth didn’t you understand, Klaus?” Diego whispers. Even this resonates under the walls of the cave, bouncing against the cold stone of the ceiling and the rough edges of the soundproof box.

Still mute, black scarf around her neck to hide the scar, Allison looks at him with these disappointed eyes that could only make one regret every choice they made that led them to letting her down today. Klaus shrugs it off.

“What? If it’s isolated enough for her, it’s got to be quiet enough for Luther upstairs too,” he protests.

“This has got to be one of the dumbest things you’ve said today,” Ben says.

“But not the dumbest,” Klaus points out.

“I’m sorry, why are you here again?” Diego asks.

“Why am I here? I’m the one who started this whole,” Klaus twirls his forefinger around in the air, “this whole business. This enterprise. This shindig.”

“Please stop,” Diego says, but he has a point.

Ben remembers Klaus slouching on the ground with his back to the couch Diego was lying on, looking at Diego’s beer bottle with hungry eyes, listening to him talk about how nothing about this felt right, and what did Luther know about Vanya, what did he know about anything anyway. Ben remembers Klaus, drawling, _well, Luther’s not here now, is he?_ And Diego’s inebriated face, fuzzy around the edges, dawning with the realization.

Ben remembers going upstairs to the bittersweet scene of Luther sleeping at the side of Allison’s bed with his head in his hands. The pinkish light coming from her room’s girly drawn curtains felt out of place on his apeish frame. And Allison, of course, sitting on her bed with the tight composure of someone trying hard not to cry. When they gestured at her, she slid across the bed to them, tiptoed on her naked feet until she was out the door, flinching when Luther let out a snore that was just a bit too loud.

In the end, she is the one who made the call. Diego is here for the muscles. And the complaining.

That’s why he kicks the door open instead of pushing it like a normal person because everything Diego does has to be dramatic. (And then he wonders how he and Klaus are related, somehow.)

Ben hears the soft sizzle of Allison writing in her notebook, her pen sliding in quick angry motions over the paper, and he peers over her shoulder to read _FOCUS, GUYS._ When they get into the room, walking closer to the box, she noticeably shivers in her scarf and nightshirt against the cold air of the underground. Ben can’t feel these things anymore, but he likes to pretend to. Her feet pitter-patter against the cement where Diego’s boots thump around, impossibly loud in the perfect silence.

“Where is she?” Diego whispers, peering into the box. Allison, pressed against the glass, tapping softly against it as if Vanya could hear it, makes an anguished hum. “The asshole turned off the lights. I can’t see shit inside this.” But Ben can, and he slides into the prison with a tiny wave meant for Klaus.

It takes a second for his eyes to adjust in the dark - which raises a whole lot of questions about ghost biology that Ben gave up on when he realized that the unmaterial embodiment of his dead soul was stuck going through puberty forever somehow - and even when they finally do he wants to shut them again, to unsee his sister’s body curled up in a corner, still skinny and pale, impossibly fragile against the backdrop of grey pikes. At first, he thinks she is sleeping, but her shoulders are shaking, sobs subdued now as if she had forgotten she was still crying. He tries to tell her something - anything, that it will all be alright maybe - something that she can’t hear, of course.

He steps out back to Klaus. Even if they go right through him, the spikes of the box are sinister to push against. Outside, Diego is tugging on the lever with all of his strength, one long pull at a time. It was built for someone the size of Pogo or Luther, and his muscles strain against his tank top, even with his enhanced strength, but he is making it either way. They all are, even if they have to dynamite the shit out of this prison.

“She’s alright,” he tells Klaus. “Well. She’s not, obviously, but, you know.”

“That’s fair,” Klaus says. “What’s up with Dad and locking up his children in hellish places anyway? Was this in any of his parenting books?”

“Someday you need to tell us which imaginary friend you’re talking to,” Diego grunts.

Ben snorts. “Yeah, I think not.”

“He says it’s a hard no on this one,” Klaus repeats with a grin.

There is a last snarl from Diego and then, just like that, the door is open. Allison rushes inside, crouched down next to Vanya before any of them even has time to hover in the entrance. She puts her hand on their sister’s cheek, a touch so tender Ben aches with longing, and Vanya stares at her, wide and incredulous.

“You’re here,” she whispers. “You’re really here.”

Allison nods.

“Why-” Vanya starts and stops. “Why would you do that? After I- what I did to you-”

“You’re number seven,” Diego says as if it meant anything.

“There’s not that many people who can understand how it feels to be raised by Reg Hargreeves, you know,” Klaus contributes. “If you’re gone too, who are we going to tell our trauma to? A therapist? _Ha._ Hard pass.”

“But I-” Vanya starts to protest, but then Allison’s arms are slung around her shoulders, and she buries her face in her hair, and for a second Ben lets himself hope everything will be alright in the end.

 

Luther doesn’t like it, but now that Vanya is out and staying in Allison’s room, there’s not much he can do except hover worriedly at Allison’s side. Which he does. _All day long._

Allison shoots him icy glares whenever she turns around. Knowing them, they’ll have made up in less than a week. But in the meantime, she spends most of her day holed up upstairs with Vanya, listening to her practice. She says - well, writes - that talking with people isn’t much fun when you can only listen to their bullshit anyway. It makes Ben laugh for a little too long, and Klaus shoots him worried glances, but the irony of the situation isn't lost on him either.

The first time Vanya pulls out her bow, she and Allison both flinch, and Luther rushes by Allison’s side to help her breathe again - they’re all so sure her stitches are going to break that day for some panicky, frantic moments. It takes a while for her to calm down, but she does. 

Once again, the old house is filled with violin, Vivaldi melting into Chopin or Brahms, but now, whenever the chandelier shudders, they all shoot it worried looks. Ben hears it across the hallway when he is staying with Klaus, trying to invent an elaborate high five for when Klaus finally gets control of his power and manages to touch him again. They both know it is just an excuse to see if it will again happen by accident when they least expect it. So far, it hasn’t been going great. The circles under Klaus’ kohl-lined eyes only grow darker with time, and he keeps wearing long sleeves to hide the way his hands are shaking more often than not.

“Hey, remember when I asked you how you got your time travel powers and you basically told me to fuck off?” Klaus asks Five in the morning.

On the other side of the table, Vanya pauses in her process of making peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches and passing them to Five without a word. She still looks like she could fall apart at any given moment, even so early in the day. Ben is pretty sure she hasn’t been sleeping much either in the past three days.

“Why, are you missing on our quality bonding time?”

Klaus snorts. “Haha, very funny. Great sense of humor. Pretty sure you got it from me.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Diego says. Five snorts, pouring more coffee into his cup, which Dad would have hated with a passion - both the fact that he drank coffee black and the cup, which is painted with a yellow smiling face and a little sun saying _I’m not a morning person._

(Ben saw Mom and Diego come back home with it yesterday. She talked for a whole hour about the weather once she was back, and Diego listened to her and hummed in all the right places, looking way too smug. Guess now that Dad isn’t here anymore and her protocols are all messed up, there is nobody to forbid her from leaving the house.)

“What would you think if I gave you a once in a lifetime opportunity to pass on your knowledge to a worthy student?” Klaus says.

“Why, do you know one?” Five says.

Klaus pouts. “Come _on.”_

“Come on, Five, you know he’s going to annoy you until you tell him yes,” Luther says around a mouthful of toast, without getting his eyes off the morning paper.

“Yeah, Five, wouldn’t you like an occasion to tell him everything he’s doing wrong and how you’re so much better than him for a few hours?” Diego adds. “Oh, nevermind, you already do that.”

“Excuse me, why are you even crashing here? You’re a thirty-year-old man staying in your parents’ house,” Five says.

“You’re fifty-eight.”

“Yes, but I look thirteen,” Five points out. “Have you ever seen a real estate agent trying to sell a house to a preteen?”

Diego laughs, a short burst that lasts for all of three seconds but surprises everyone in the room, including himself, from the look on his face. 

Truth is, they all decided to move back in for now. It’s a matter of convenience, really. As he said, it’s not like Five can very well rent a place with that baby face. Vanya is here because she can’t be alone or unsupervised right now, and Allison is here because Vanya can’t be alone or unsupervised right now. Luther, well, where’s he even going to go? Diego’s reasons for staying are mysterious and probably brooding-related. Klaus has been crashing at others’ places ever since he left the mansion like the human leech he is, and poaching off the Hargreeves fortune is no different, or so he claims.

Ben stays because this is where Klaus is, and he has no say in the matter. He doesn’t mind it as much as most of the other places he followed Klaus to though.

In the end Five caves and tells Klaus he will help him if he does his share of the dishes and drives him to the mall or the cinema once a week without sticking around for the screening. Klaus smacks him on both cheeks and tells him he can’t wait to see a movie with his baby brother.

 

To say the seances go poorly would be an understatement.

“Klaus, it’s like you’re not even trying!” Five whines or the hundredth time in the past three days.

Klaus, who is sitting cross-legged next to an Ouija board with his eyes closed, says through gritted teeth, “Or maybe - just maybe - you’re a shit teacher, have you considered that?”

There is incense swelling in the room, heavy and sweet, and the bits of the Ouija Klaus is supposed to move with his mind are staying very still, and Ben can’t breathe. His heartbeat is too fast and his head is too light and he shouldn’t be able to feel any of this - he doesn’t, not really - so maybe it’s for the best when he stands up and lets himself slip through the floor. He watches the old wooden structure of the mansion float past his eyes, the glass chandelier, the little specks of dust of Vanya’s old room, unused for so long, then the freckles of Vanya’s face, skin sticking out on a backdrop of cherry wood, pale and ghostly.

“Hey, thanks for driving me today,” he hears her say as if she were miles away. “You know, maybe it would do you some good too, Diego. I mean, I wouldn’t want to meddle in your business or anything-”

“Yeah, ‘cause when have your decisions ever turned my life upside down, right?” Diego tells her, and she bristles. If Ben didn’t know Diego better, he would think he looked sorry.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles, shifting on her feet. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

A sigh. “Vanya. T-therapists are not really my thing, alright? I don’t really like talking. About feelings. About things. In general.”

“Oh,” she says, glancing up at his face again. “What do you usually do then?”

“I box.”

They stay silent for a few awkward beats, and Vanya moves to walk out the door again, but Diego says, “Hey, I could bring you out for boxing someday. Might help with your whole, uh-”

“Destroyer of the Earth, harbinger of the apocalypse, ye who shall not be named, angry timebomb thing?”

He snorts. “Sure, if that’s what you wanna call it.”

Ben almost smiles as he lets himself down further, sinks into the floor, melts into the living room where Allison and Luther are arguing like they always seem to these days; into the kitchen where Mom is staring at nothing, impossibly lost, before Pogo comes in and tugs at her hand and she plasters a smile on her face, fake and gushing with sweetness; into the basement where he sits inside a prison of silence made for someone much more powerful than he was, hoping the quiet will soothe the erratic beats of a heart he is not supposed to feel anymore. It takes a while for him to catch his breath.

When he finally does, three minutes have turned into three days, and Klaus yells at him.

“You - absolute - fucking - dumbass! I was worried sick!” he says, voice unnaturally high, gripping him by the shoulders with all the strength of his bony arms. “Who do you even think you are, young man? This is way past your bedtime! You are so grounded.”

“Klaus,” Ben calls out.

“No, don’t go all cute on me, there’s no use in pleading, what is done is done, and your puppy eyes-”

“Klaus,” Ben says, louder this time.

“What?” he snaps.

Ben grins.

“You’re holding me.”

“What do you mean I’m- oh, I _am_ holding you.”

They look at each other only for a moment before both bursting into a fit of giggles. Ben keeps palming at his brother’s face, sweaty and unkempt, his messy unwashed hair, his stoner all-black clothes, and it’s the best feeling he has ever had in a long time. Of course, he is dead, so it’s also the only feeling he has had in a long time, but that’s beside the point.

 

It wasn’t much, being able to feel Klaus albeit not anyone else. Somehow it extended to all Klaus owned too, and suddenly he had to stop Klaus from stealing Dad’s golden plates again to buy books, clothes (all of them in the most comically bad taste), and memorably, a football, which they threw around until it hit Diego square in the head - an accident, a total accident, Klaus and he swore through their giggles, Luther keeping Diego pinned against his torso for only a few seconds before he snuck away and kicked Klaus in the shins - and a bunch of other stuff in the mansion. Mostly useless junk, like old Chinese vases or family heirlooms nobody wanted anyway.

It was amazing.

He and Klaus have always been a duo, for as long as he can remember. They were almost always in the same room, hanging out, forgetting whose sweater it was they were wearing today, ignoring each other because of something stupid one of them (Klaus) had said. In these first few months, when Ben had to struggle to keep appearing at his brother’s side, everything had felt wrong and off balance.

Klaus and him had each other, and Allison and Luther had each other too, in their way. Diego and Luther as well, weirdly, were something of a pair, always trying to one-up each other. So it shouldn’t surprise him to see Five and Vanya start hanging out with each other like they used to. It does anyway, because it’s weird, because Vanya has been an outcast for so long, because Five has been fighting for forty-five years to prevent, well, _Vanya_ from happening.

“Coffee,” Five says, reading on the couch, and Vanya, curled up in an armchair, hums when she stretches, grabs the pot without looking, hands it to him.

“Charges,” she asks. “I’m missing seven letters. The first one is an E?”

“Entrusts,” he answers, sounding bored, then, with an undignified cough, “Wait, this is decaf!”

“You know what Luther said. You might be an old man, but your body is going through puberty.” (He had said that, and something about not messing up his brain, which led to everyone in the room laughing in derision. Not messing it up any _more,_ he insisted.)

“I just spent three hours,” Five started, trying to sound hardass but only coming off whiny, “trying to teach something to Klaus. Do you know how bad a student he is? I’ve met hyperactive squirrels who could pay attention longer.”

“I resent that,” Klaus calls out from the next room.

“Stop eavesdropping,” Ben says. He knows Klaus is making a face at him without having to see him do it.

“Hey, how many hyperactive squirrels did you meet in the apocalypse again?” Vanya asks.

“I think I liked you better when you were blowing people up,” Five bites, and at Ben’s right Pogo bristles, alarmed, but Vanya only laughs.

She never finishes her crossword puzzle anyway. It sits forgotten on the table for a few days before Ben gets so frustrated that he tells Klaus to stop right here, picks up Vanya’s pen and fills it up (number 27, _who loved Endymion,_ _Selene,_ of course) before he even realizes what he is doing. When his mind catches up, his grip tightens on the pen, and he almost tears up - probably would have if Klaus wasn’t clapping his back loudly like a coach a bit too proud of his quarterback.

 

They’re starting to sit down for lunch when it happens - only some of them, Diego, Five, Vanya and Mom, because Allison is out today trying to find a therapist to attend so that she keeps up her end of the deal with the judge, Luther is driving her, and Klaus is still sleeping until the early hours of the afternoon like he does more often than not. In hindsight, it was doomed to happen eventually - it was the moment they had all been waiting for, fidgeting past Vanya in the hallways, treating her like they were handling a particularly stressed out porcelain doll. It was better all out on the open.

Ben is hanging out next to the table, having watched Mom cook all morning. He used to love reading, which proved hard after he died when he couldn’t hold books for the longest time, so peering over her shoulder to read her recipes was both nice and bittersweet. Now he just sticks around, walking with her as she puts down the plates. Five is sitting at the table reading a science book so boring Ben can’t even be bothered to look at it. It’s also wildly inaccurate, considering the noises he makes. Vanya comes down, lingers by the door for a few seconds, hesitant as always before she walks up to Mom and helps her carry the cutlery.

“Oh, hi honey!” Mom beams at her. “Just the person I was hoping to talk to.”

Vanya shifts on her feet, pulls her sleeves over her hands. She is floating into a white shirt, Dad’s, probably - she hasn’t been back at her apartment yet to pick up her things. In fact, she only left the house for therapy and, once, to talk to her employer about getting a sabbatical. (She was shut down and more fidgety than usual when she came back, fired on the spot, and they all stayed away from her in fear for a while.)

Wearing the same two sweaters for the past week has proved not to be enough.

“Oh, really? What did you want to talk to me about?”

“I got your pills,” Mom chips.

And then - it feels weird, even for Ben - it’s like his center of gravity has been shifted. Like he can feel gravity at all and like it’s all upside down. All wrong. Turned towards one point in the room. Vanya. Vanya, who stands here in the eye of a tornado of silver spoons and china and wooden table legs.

Five teleports on the other side of the kitchen on instinct. A second later, Diego crashes into the room with a bang, throws himself at her. They fall in a heap of limbs. Vanya cries out in pain and surprise. There seems to be a struggle down there; tiny fists thrown around; legs kicking. But then, before Ben has time to even realize what just happened, the cutlery stops moving. When he comes closer to them, he sees Diego is holding her down.

“Shhh, you’re good,” he says. His arms are tight around her in a mix between a chokehold and a very awkward hug - then again, Diego probably has more experience with the former.

Through it all, Mom doesn’t waver, ever-so-smiling, tilting her head. When the noise stops and he looks up at her, she tuts at them. “You silly kids, always with the dramatics.”

“I don’t- I’m not taking the pills,” Vanya sobs against the floor. “Never again.”

“Of course you’re not,” Diego says, even though he obviously has no idea what they’re talking about. “Is she, Mom?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, honey, I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding. I meant the sleeping pills. Allison told me you weren’t sleeping well, and so I bought you some from the city. The clerk was the loveliest young woman. You’d like her.”

“See?” Diego says.

There is a last shudder, and the plates all fall down. Number Five sighs before he teleports out of their reach again. They break into hundreds of little white and blue and gold shards, sticking up on the wooden floor. There is a long trail of sticky sauce forming a circle around the room where a pot-au-feu once was. Mom’s perfect blonde hair is ruined.

“Are you going to be fine now?” Five says, bored.

“Are you?” Diego asks.

Vanya nods. He stands up and lets her go, and she sits on the floor with her face red and snot running down her nose. She is crying again. Five and Diego stand in awkward silence, unsure of what to do now, but Mom crouches down next to her and produces a handkerchief out of thin air to dab at her cheeks. She runs her other hand through her hair softly, whispering sweet nothings about good girls.

Klaus chooses that moment to crash down the stairs.

“Does _anyone_ in this house have some shred of respect for my beauty sleep?”

“Seems a bit too late for that,” Diego grumbles. Klaus ignores him in favor of watching the scene in front of him shrewdly.

“So. I’m guessing no pot-au-feu today, uh.”

“Well, silly bunny here has ruined most of our china,” Mom says. “Seems like we’ll be eating out of the palms of our hands today, boys!”

“Or we can just order takeout,” Diego offers. Mom seems shocked by the proposal, and it takes a bit of coaxing from Klaus and Diego to convince her they aren’t committing some sort of blasphemy. Five, who doesn’t know what takeout is, poor boy, stands around intrigued by this brand new concept before they pick up the landline. Then there is more bickering to come to an agreement on the restaurant because Diego wants pizza and Five wants burgers and Klaus insists on getting something foreign-sounding that involves raw fish and algae, to all of their dismay.

It takes a few minutes for Vanya to perk up and say, her voice so low they almost don’t hear her, “Pizza sounds good.”

“Finally,” Diego says dramatically, throwing his arms around. “Someone with taste.”

“Fine then, I guess we’re getting pizza for lunch,” Klaus says, lying down on the couch.

“What?” Five protests, sounding more thirteen-year-old than ever. “This is so unfair! You’re only agreeing to this because she can drop a chandelier on your face!”

“Well, I happen to like my face, unlike some people here,” Klaus answers, looking pointedly in Diego’s direction.

“Five, hush now, honey,” Mom says. “I’m sure you could drop a chandelier on anyone’s face if you wanted to.”

 _“Mom._ Don’t encourage him,” Diego complains.

“I _could,_ though,” Five says.

When Ben remembers to turn around to look at Vanya, there is a smile on her face, tiny and flickering and as hesitant as everything she does these days. But even then, when she gets up and join the others on the couch, bringing her knees up to her chest to make herself even smaller, Ben thinks he sees something in her that looks like hope.


	2. diego i

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Yes. I got work. Do you still remember what that is, Spaceboy?”
> 
> Luther's jaw visibly tightens at the name in Diego’s mouth, and he resolves to use it more often. “You don’t have a job.”
> 
> “I _could_ have a job,” Diego retorts. “You wouldn’t know. In spite of popular belief, you’re not actually our dad.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello guys, it’s your local disaster bisexual, doubling the length of her chapters because she loves PAIN
> 
> for real. this chapter was SO LONG. that i ended up cutting it in two chapters. i almost cried. i wrote 30 pages. in one week. anyway expect the next one in one or two days the time for louise and i to reread it
> 
> the response to this fic has been amazing and i wanted to thank everyone because i couldn’t answer all the comments so. i. love you. i would die for you. seriously i read all of your comments and want to cry but in a good way
> 
> ALSO NOTE: i know it’s been said by robert sheehan that klaus is pan and i totally accept that as canon and at one point in this he says he is gay. why is it you ask? well. i’m bi and i joke about being gay 24/7 so 
> 
> finally i did almost the entire thing listening to the playlist number two by Emma Shea on spotify which is SO GOOD. GOOD GOD. there’s the cure and the offspring and so many classics you need to listen to it asap

Sometimes Diego wakes up and he forgets Eudora is dead. 

It’s six and he goes downstairs to have breakfast - old habits die hard, and back when they were kids he used to be the earliest down there to steal a few moments alone with Mom. It’s a nice morning, the sun just starting to rise, no clouds to be seen anywhere, miles away from the apocalypse they know and hate. He helps her around the breakfast food she picked that day (they are all glad to be free from oatmeal but none of them more so than Mom, Diego thinks), flipping pancakes or breaking eggshells, telling her a funny story about a case he used to work on, the one that goes like: “Then the p-perp turned around trying to grab his gun - like a  _ moron _ \- and he just. Trips on his own cape. And falls down. And I look at him, and his face is slack and all, and I’m thinking oh no, screw it, he’s dead. Which sucks, you know, because we got a hostage situation and he’s the only one who knows the password. But P-Patch just crouches, looks at him and says,  _ did you become a criminal because you were too bad an actor? _ And he turns around and says  _ bullets might have hurt, but honestly, this was more painful.” _

Then Mom laughs with him, as she always does, before she asks, innocently, in her eighties’ infomercial wife voice: “Well this Patch girl sounds like a real riot, Diego. I’d love to meet her. You should invite her up here sometimes! Do you know if she has any allergies?”

And then, when he is about to tell her how as much as a single peanut could be deadly, that’s when he remembers. 

These moments feel more painful than being shot in the back himself.

That’s why Diego likes better the mornings where he wakes up hollow and rootless, like a wrecked ship on the shore. He saw one of them once while he was on holidays with her, when things were still good between them. He asked her to dare him to jump on the ship, and she said  _ no, Diego, please, I’m asking you, don’t jump on the ship, _ and he climbed it up anyway; she said she was pissed even as she was sitting right next to him on the deck, her legs dangling over a big hole in that crappy, moth-eaten wood. They took the dumbest, most touristic pictures that day, making goofy faces at her old camera, the sand under their feet. 

At least he still has the memories. In a few months, he is going to start forgetting. And in a few years, the pictures will be all he will have left.

He shoves his gloves in his bag and goes to the boxing club.

 

He didn’t usually go so early in the morning before  _ (Eudora died) _ he moved back in the mansion. 

Back when he was living alone, in his crappy flat in a crappy building in the crappiest part of the city, this is how his day went: he woke up at odds hours of the afternoon, ate cereals or bacon or whatever he had in his fridge at the moment, sometimes nothing, went boxing to make some money and pay his crappy rent, then off to work, if you could call vigilantism that. Then he’d get home with his skin bloody and his knuckles raw, sleep, and repeat. It was a lonely life, but it was the one he chose when he dropped out of police academy.

Of course, nothing was lonely back when he and Patch were together; but then again, as she said, maybe putting the weight of your lonesomeness on one person wasn’t the best idea. 

Now, the schedule is different. Go tell his body that, though - it’s like being hungover for the first week and a half. Waking up at six is alright, still - most of the times lunch with the rest is what he can barely get through, so much so that he sometimes gets Mom to pack his lunch and send him off in the mornings. He almost does it today too: he has the brown paper bag and the bacon and pickles sandwich almost ready when his brother comes in. Diego doesn’t want to acknowledge his presence. He wants to keep standing in the kitchen, as ridiculously out of place as he feels in the domestic setting with his all-black leather uniform, his boots dirtying up the shiny tiles with mud and dirt - he has got to apologize to Mom for this later -, his fingers clumsy over the kitchen knife. 

“Diego,” Luther starts with his team-leader, because-dad-said-so voice. Diego doesn’t intend to but he freezes anyway - fucking muscle memory - turns around slowly. Luther looks as out of place as Diego in the kitchen sill, his big shoulders reaching both ends of the doorway. “Are you leaving?”

_ So close. _ “Yes. I got work. Do you still remember what that is, Spaceboy?”

His jaw visibly tightens at the name in Diego’s mouth, and he resolves to use it more often. “You don’t have a job.”

“I  _ could _ have a job,” Diego retorts, shoving the sandwich in the bag and the bag in his backpack, giving up on the slice of pecan pie he had his eyes on. “You wouldn’t know. In spite of popular belief, you’re not actually our dad.”

“Well. I don’t want to be Dad,” Luther says, surprising both of them. 

Diego zips up his backpack, throws it on, says, “Good for you, big boy. Only took you thirty years.”

He shoulders Luther out of the way while making a beeline for the door. If the old monkeybrain thinks his disapproval means anything to Diego, he’s got his head even more scrambled up by the experiments than his body.

“I heard about what happened yesterday,” Luther calls out to Diego’s back. “Pogo and Mom could have been hurt pretty badly, you know. I just came here to thank you for being there.”

Diego stops on the brink of the doorway. Tenses up. Oh no, he  _ didn’t _ .

But he turns around, and Luther is watching him more shrewdly than he usually does, his blue eyes almost like Hargreeves’ in this light, and they both know he has won. The little shit.

“You know what, I take it back,” Diego drawls. “I bet Dad would be real proud of you right now.”

He is glad he doesn’t miss the stricken expression on Luther’s face as he climbs back up the stairs. 

 

There isn’t a schedule to keep watch of Vanya, not officially - Allison would have never let them get away with it - but for once Five, Luther and him are all on the same page about something. 

Allison and her spend the most time together, and Five is a close second. Then there’s Klaus, who hangs out with her at what seems to all of them like very random and irregular intervals, but which are still more than Diego and Luther do. As for the latter, he sticks around with her from times to times when Five is giving Klaus lessons, but things are still stilted and awkward between them and Vanya doesn’t bother hiding her resentment very well.

So it is natural that Diego only ends up watching her when Allison leaves for therapy and driving her around for her own, twice a week. After all, apart maybe from Luther now, he is the one who gets along the least with her - mostly because of his own personality, true, but if she can’t handle a few rough truths about herself, what can he do about it, right? 

Alright, so, yeah, he’s a bit of a jerk, which is how they get in this sort of situations.

“You know, you can’t blame our family for everything wrong that happens in your life.”

Around them, evening rain is pouring in the busy street as people pull up their umbrellas like a sea of black flowers. Vanya’s frown turns into a disgusted face, directed right at him. He doesn’t pay much attention to it though, focusing his eyes on the road instead of her. He would rather not crash them into a lamp post if possible: even without the shock it would cause, she already has a sickly vibe, so pale with her black hoodie, back jacket, black everything. He wonders if she has always looked like this.  

“I was a kid locked in a box for _ weeks _ ,” she says. “Then an entire part of my personality was erased.”

“Yeah. Too bad they couldn’t erase more,” Diego grumbles, then, adds louder, when she looks at him like she is about to cry or yell or blow up the street: “Sorry! God I was just kidding, alright. Some friendly brother-and-sister banter.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I  _ was _ . Look, I’m driving you back from fucking therapy. I’m being a nice, helpful big brother. What more do you want?”

“You’re just doing it because Luther told you to,” Vanya says, not fooled in the slightest.

Diego snorts. “Yeah, sure, ‘cause I always do whatever Luther tells me to.”

Vanya is silent for a bit, her head pushed against the window while they wait for the light to turn green, the light of the lamp post sliding in weird half shapes against her skin. Sometimes when the light hits her eyes just right they glint golden and Diego itches for his knife. Most of the time, though, she just looks sad. 

“You tell me I’m blaming our father for my own problems,” she finally says. “But then what are you doing?”

“What?”

“You run around town in spandex-”

“It’s leather,” he corrects, but she just rolls her eyes at him. 

“You run around town in spandex throwing knives at nutjobs like me and pretend you’re, like, this rogue vigilante,” she continues, “but you’re really just doing what Reginald has always trained you to do. And then you’re always mad at everyone and everything, but really you’re mostly mad at him and Luther. How is that not blaming your problems on our family?”

Diego pauses for a few seconds, starts up the car again and rolls a little until they reach the next red lights - fucking city driving. “Hey, don’t try to shrink me. I’m not shrink material. I’m unshrinkable.”

“I’m just saying,” she raises both of her hands, “we’re not so different, you and I.”

Yeah, sure, she only almost destroyed the Earth and he got kicked off the police academy for punching an officer, totally the same issues. “Suit yourself,” he says instead, because he is trying to be less of a jerk to the girl who can make his head explode without even breaking a sweat.

There are a few more seconds of silence in the habitacle, only invaded by city noises, the couple walking down the street next to them debating over the movie they just saw, before Vanya’s voice fills up the space again, low and fragile. “Isn’t it easier though?”

He makes a turn, thinks of pretending he doesn’t understand what she means, and yet somehow admits, “Still beats feeling your feelings.” Pause. “Except for you. You’re not allowed to not feel your feelings. Keep going to therapy.”

She giggles, actually, real-life giggles in his new car with the fancy radio bought with Hargreeves’ inheritance, and says: “Yeah, I know. My therapist told me causing the apocalypse because of post traumatic stress is an  _ unhealthy coping mechanism.” _

He smiles at the windshield, at the grey, washed out road in front of him and finds he almost means it. On the way home he tells her to call Mom and ask if they can bring back food - now that she and Five have discovered the joys of takeout, they keep getting adorably excited about it, opening the carton boxes as if they were kids opening Christmas presents. 

 

After rejecting every single one of Klaus’ restaurant propositions (which range from trashy, like that Indian dinner with the four dollars menu that had a salmonella scandal just last month, to ridiculous, like macarons from Ladurée, with no inbetween), they decide on pizza night again, for the second time this week. They sit around the livingroom table eating out of the box because Diego and Mom still need to go out and buy new plates tomorrow. Pogo has carried away a box with him to eat while he studies Dad’s old documents, in spite of Luther’s protests. As much as the others like Pogo, after all the recent revelations, they can’t help feeling a bit uneasy around him, honestly. 

It only takes five minutes of Diego and Vanya coming home with armfuls of pizza for everyone to start mocking Klaus for picking something weird with pineapple as a topping, out of all the choices he could have made. Diego lays back on his elbows propped up against one of the couches and smirks at his flailing before he focuses on cutting his own perfectly reasonable choice of pizza. In that way he has learnt to always keep track of threats at the back of his head, he is entirely too aware of the presence of Vanya, sitting on the couch behind him with her knees pushed against her chest, leaning over him in the search of the vegetarian pizza she is sharing with Allison, who is sharing the other end of the couch with Luther. The latter, having taken three different pizzas mostly for himself (and a bit, Diego suspects, to force Vanya and Allison to eat some of his share), is content waiting for everyone to make their pick.

“You,” Klaus says, pointing at Diego in particular, eyes wide and blue, “are all  _ heathens _ , who don’t know how to appreciate the fine things in life.”

“Your other restaurant option was to give us food poisoning,” Allison scribbles, and Luther repeats it for everyone. They’re sitting very close, and he slings his arm across her shoulders innocently to have a better view of her notebook, so Diego guesses they made up at some point. It’s her third notebook this week, because Allison loves talking almost as much as she is good at it, and she is starting to buy pretty, fancy ones instead of the boring old black covers. This one is a reproduction of the burn book from Mean Girls. (A movie Diego definitely doesn’t know about because he is not the type of guy to be peer pressured into watching girly movies while babysitting his girlfriend’s niece, no sir.)

“Now, Allison, I’m sure Ladurée’s services have had a drop in quality, but it’s no reason to be that harsh,” Klaus tells her. 

“All in favor of Klaus not being allowed to vote on food picks anymore,” Five says, and raises his hand. Almost every one of them follows suit, but Klaus ignores them in favor of hissing at a shadow behind Reginald Hargreeves’ old chair, the one they would rather sit on the floor than use anyway. Diego doesn’t even bother looking behind the chair and wonders if he’s getting too used to Klaus’ whole Klausness. 

“This right here?” Klaus informs them, very dignified. “This is homophobic.”

Allison laughs, her nose scrunched and her shoulders trembling even if there is no sound coming off of her mouth, and as much as Luther is confused and Five seems blasé, Vanya is amused too. 

“How the fuck is this homophobic, Klaus?” Diego sighs.

“I’m gay and you’re being mean to me.”

“I don’t think you understand what homophobia is.”

“Oh, and you do?” Klaus shoots back. 

“Excuse me -” Luther says, coughing around a mouthful of Bacon Groovy. “You are what?”

Diego stops and looks at Klaus with wide, alarmed eyes, because- “What, he doesn’t know?”

“I might have forgotten to mention it, come to think of it,” Klaus shrugs off. “I mean, I thought this much would have been obvious from the  _ everything about me.” _

Allison shrugs as if to say,  _ well, yes _ , Five looks bored, and Vanya is busy being really invested in her pizza. Luther makes the transition from confused puppy to remembering he is an authority figure (ah!) and going above the initial shock. He lowers himself on his elbows, cardigan stretching in protest against the movement.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Klaus, very sincerely. “I didn’t mean to assume, I just- you know we love you no matter what, right?”

Klaus snickers. “Oh, trust me, Luther, if there is a reason why someone here doesn’t love me, I’m pretty sure it’s got nothing to do with my men-fucking. But you know what, thanks, big guy,” he adds, stretching across the table to pat Luther’s shoulder. “I appreciate it.”

“Klaus is right,” Five says. He is the one sitting next to Klaus on the floor, picking the pepperoni off his pizza. “He  _ is _ very annoying.” 

“Aw! Thank you, dear boy. Your words warm my cold, dead heart,” Klaus says, both of his hands crossed on his chest. 

“You’re welcome,” Five says, then, looking very innocent: “You know, it’s really important to me to promise you that I only hate you because you’re an asshole. No other reason.”

Klaus smacks him on the cheek in answer with a disgusting wet sound and Five yelps and wipes at the tomato stain on his skin and then, in the tumble resulting from Five jumping from a glowing blue space crack to land on top of Klaus and dunk his head in his Diet Coke (someone has got to do something about this boy’s murderous impulses, but Diego isn’t going to be that person - pot, kettle, and all that), one of Luther’s three pizzas is ruined. Luther is too busy trying to dial down the craziness to care, though. 

On the semi-sane end of the room, Diego ignores them and cuts Vanya and Allison’s pizza in neat little triangles with his cleanest knife, which still raises an eyebrow from Allison. Mostly because he calls his cleanest knife his knife that doesn’t have dried blood on it. But hey, still better than getting up to get to the kitchen, and he doesn’t see them complaining. 

He only sticks around for a few more minutes before he snuffs half of his pizza back in the box, gets the box and himself in his car, and drives away. Nighttime is setting, there are people to save and all that crap. 

 

Vigilantism comes with mindless violence, flesh wounds, sore muscles, and odd sleeping hours. Much like a cat, Diego rests in bits and pieces - a few hours in the afternoon, a couple hours long nap in the morning, a few more hours in his car at night when he wakes up with a terrible crack in his neck that keeps him cranky all day long. 

Which is why he is all the more pissed when someone wants to take the few precious hours of sleep he has away from him with some nonsense.

“You want to _ what,” _ he asks flatly. He is laying on the couch, staring at the wooden ceiling on top of him with vacant eyes, his boots dirtying up Mom’s throw pillows  _ (again, _ God, he really has to start taking them off inside the house), entire body aching - apparently he got so beat up and tired last night he didn’t bother making it to his room. There is a cup of tea left for him on the coffee table, and a knitted blanket covering about three-quarters of his muscular frame. 

“Workout,” Luther repeats, his big hand rubbing at his turtleneck. “Together. I was just thinking this could be good for the team.”

Diego groans, puts his hands over his face. There are so many things wrong with this statement and he is so tired he can’t keep track of them. “First off, team? What team? Second, how would we trying to strangle each other help anyone, except myself when I finally finish the job? Third-” he pauses, turns around, frees one of his hands to grab the cup, which is still warm: he doesn’t know how Mom does it. “I don’t have a third, actually. Oh, wait, no, I know:  _ fuck _ you.”

“Come on,” Luther says. “This could be fun. Remember when we were kids and we used to play together all the time?”

“I remember you beat my ass to the ground and Hargreeves congratulated you on it.”

Luther pauses. Diego can literally see him reexamining their entire childhood. He gets that expression more and more these days, and Diego still can’t stand him, but he also feels a bit sorry for the guy. At least the rest of them realized Hargreeves’ paternal manners were just a slim cover for abuse when they were teenagers and could build their lives out of this lie - Luther has wasted thirty years of his life  _ believing. _ After a few seconds of existential crisis, Luther settles on: “Alright, but take away, like, all the toxic competitivity-”

“So basically our entire childhood,” Diego cuts, but he’s moving both of his hands away from his face this time. “God, you really want this, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Luther answers, embarrassed but honest.

“Why? And don’t give me all that crap about team bonding, I know I’m not the one in our team you want to  _ bond _ with.”

Luther’s fists tighten, and he visibly takes a breath before he ignores the comment and says, “Look. There aren’t that many people I can actually train with. It so happens that you’re one of them. It sucks, but it’s not like I have that much choice.”

“Oh, so I’m your last choice.”

Luther has the decency to look ashamed by this, hunching even more than usual. “Alright. Fine, I guess I’ll-”

“No, no, you don’t get it,” Diego says, standing up on his elbows. Some of his tea spills on his costume, and it will stain, but it’s not like it could get any dirtier anyway. “I thought it was shady because you wanted to spend time with me. Now that I know it’s only because you have an actual motive for it, I’d be glad to kick your ass.”

“Sure. ‘Cause that’s totally what’s about to happen,” Luther deadpans.

Somehow, despite Diego’s louder, more insistent and frankly more violent proposals  _ (it’s like, a judo match, but with  _ knives _ ), _ they end up jogging together. According to Diego, jogging is for single parents who still got it and have enough money to live by without having to work mornings. It’s not that he doesn’t like it per se - it’s just that there are faster, surer ways to build muscle. But if that’s what Supreme Leader Luther wants, then he gets.

Luther comes to get him again the next morning at a slightly more decent hour, and they run for two hours before Diego goes to lunch and Luther drives Allison to her appointment, and then it turns into a semi-regular event somehow, either jogging or weight building or, on a few memorable occasions, actual sparring. Luther wasn’t entirely wrong about working out with someone who could keep up with him. (Luther crushes him at weight lifting and endurance, but Diego is faster and more agile, so Diego likes to think they are kind of evenly matched, even if no one else in the house agrees.)

It turns out Diego can sort of maybe like Luther, as long as they’re not talking. 

 

Diego tells Mom all about it when they are walking around the interior decorating store, picking dishes. More accurately, it is the third interior decorating store they have been in, and so far she has bought a lot of products, which include no actual cutlery. She looks like she is having the time of her life though, so Diego isn’t going to tell her so. It doesn’t hurt that all of her choices in decoration would absolutely horrify their father too. 

In the middle of an outrageous blur of flashy colours inside unorganized shelves and appeals to consumerism  _ (3 for the price of one! 10$ the lot! Last chance to buy! Please give us money so we can buy a third yacht!),  _ Mom doesn’t look out of place, dressed in a polka-dotted gown under a flowing trench coat, red lipstick perfectly matched to her outfit. Next to her, in his dark vigilante costume and with a fresh cut on his lip courtesy of last night’s botched robbery, he looks as out of place as the Grim Reaper hanging out with the Easter Bunny. He doesn’t feel that way, though, glowering at any unfortunate sales assistant who comes their way to try to convince Mom to buy some worthless junk as if she wasn’t good enough at finding and taking home all of their worthless junk all by herself. Currently, she is poking at a snuggly pillow in the shape of an octopus with wonder, tugging at its fuzzy pink tentacles, until she looks up to Diego again and asks: “You never did go to the gym with your sister, did you?”

It takes a few seconds for Diego’s brain to catch up. To be fair, it has been almost a week since he talked to Vanya about it, and he is currently struggling to carry both a pile of plaid blankets that Mom promises will make the mansion comfier and a stitched pillow that said  _ everyone is welcome here :-) _ , so boxing and his sister are far from his more pressing preoccupations. He can feel the pillow making a break for it as he says: “Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

“Oh,” his mother says, delicately. Her smile fades a little. “That’s too bad.”

Then she hums and gets back to picking up the kraken pillow, but from Mom, it is like getting sucker-punched. Diego knows it is as close to a stern lecture as she can get, and he has never had to withstand any of those from her - usually, Reginald was the one he pissed off - unlike Klaus or Vanya or even Luther, once or twice. He winces, grabs the octopus pillow out of her hands and uses reaching a shopping cart from the other side of the room as an excuse to avoid her gaze. 

He resolves to ask Vanya over breakfast tomorrow. He rationalizes that for now, what with the way Mom bounces towards the ceramic aisle, they are stuck here all day anyway.

 

He doesn’t ask Vanya tomorrow, nor the day after that. He doesn’t have the time.

There are activities that sound suspiciously like a murder cult three towns over. It’s the kind of shit Patch would have hated - she told him so one night, near the beginning, right before she asked him to drop on the ground and high kicked a cultist standing behind him, who in the end turned out to have just been meaning to ask him for the way to their wackjob church. He isn’t sure the brutality, grit or panicked apology that followed were what started his infatuation, but it definitely helped.

Anyway, he didn’t have time to ask Vanya, if only because his life doesn’t revolve around babysitting his sister.

And then, one morning, so disgustingly early that Diego is pretty much certain he is the only one awake yet, Vanya gets down to the kitchen, eyes circled by shadows - he is pretty sure she is not taking the pills Mom had gotten her, which is a problem Allison or Luther should be dealing with, not him - and he remembers vividly about Mom’s quiet disappointment and Patch’s stern glare. He is pretty sure he dreamed about her last night, but fuck him if he could remember anything about it. She was probably kicking his sorry ass as she did back in the land of the living. 

In the land of the half-dead, Vanya stumbles around, tripping on her own feet, grabbing the coffee pot like a drowning woman reaching for a lifeboat. Now that Five had gotten caffeine into the house, most of them latched onto it desperately, even Luther, still feeling a little like they were breaking the rules whenever they did. 

“You look tired,” he tells Vanya. 

“Gee, thanks,” she says, not even looking up from her cup.

It takes him a moment to figure out why she looks different this morning. Her mussed, lackluster hair and dead eyes are the same as any other day. Most of his siblings aren’t morning persons, but she and Five are without a doubt the worst of them all, between Five’s crankiness and her zombie behavior. 

(Here is what he remembers: when they were teenagers, Allison went to the bathroom first thing in the morning and took long enough to get ready that she was unbearably perky when she got out. Now, she behaves in that soft, tired way mothers have after they got used to dealing with childish antics all day and all night long. As for Luther, he was always intensely Luther, from wake-up calls to bedtime. 

Diego wouldn’t know what Klaus was like in the mornings. He barely ever saw his brother so soon in the day ever since they quit being Reginald’s little soldiers. Diego could admire that lifestyle.) 

Then, when she sits down, rolling up her sleeves as she pushes a breakfast burrito over on her plate, and Diego gets it. 

“You look ridiculous,” he tells her. She squints up at him in disbelief and annoyance, and the collar of her pajama doesn’t crease as much as it ripples, all silky shine and lilac patterns. Diego is positive he has never seen her in clothes that colorful in their entire lives. 

“Excuse me?” 

“I said you look ridiculous,” he repeats. “I’m taking you to your place to get your clothes back today, and then I’m teaching you how to box before therapy. Be ready at three.”

Diego leaves before she has a chance to tell him off or to get the last word. He walks by Mom in the hallway, and she beams up at him, a wide honest smile gushing with more warmth than usual. He would be lying if he said his heart didn’t swell up a little, but then again, he would never talk about this, ever, so there was no problem to be had.

He and Luther sprint together that day and he beats him to the ground, then mocks him for less than ten minutes before he decides to be a grown-up about it and magnanimously stops talking about it. That  _ definitely _ makes his heart swell up with pride too.

 

“You smell disgusting,” Five informs him at lunch. 

It is only the four of them today, Five, Klaus, Mom and him, sitting around the new, cherrywood table they never usually eat on. Klaus picked Dad’s mahogany chair and is lounging on it more than he is sitting, one leg thrown over the paw-shaped arm of the chair, his torso bare under an olive army jacket Diego is pretty sure belongs too him, if only because its shoulders are way too large to be Klaus’. Five is at Ben’s old place, which seems to be causing Klaus a lot of silent distress, eating primly with all of the right forks in that ridiculous Umbrella Academy costume.

From what he heard, Allison whisked Vanya away for lunch outside (good news) and Luther eating inside Pogo’s office to review some documents (very bad news, because that meant Diego would have to break in and steal them tonight, and he didn’t have that sort of time, really). 

Diego doesn’t mind being alone with them. Or maybe he is still in a good mood over his win. Or maybe he is a newer, more emotionally mature man now, one who won’t take Five up on his sarcasm, because he understands

“This, my friend, is the smell of victory,” Diego tells him, smug and smiling.

“No, it’s  _ definitely _ the smell of sweat,” Five says.

“The leprechaun here is right,” Klaus says through a mouthful of spaghetti bolognese. “Do you ever even shower?”

Diego stabs his steak with a bit more force than necessary, and Mom shoots a worried look to her new plate. Klaus doesn’t bother hiding his tomato-stained smile.

Just yesterday, Diego was enjoying some quality alone time in the shower, surrounded by steam and the smell of strawberry because he went as far as using some of Allison’s fancy conditioner that he snuck away from her bathroom earlier in the day, which she would have murdered him for if she knew. On the other hand, he  _ is _ surrounded by either thirty-year-old toddlers or supervillains all day long, so he deserves the luxury. 

He was almost relaxed for the first time in months, which meant this was the moment Klaus chose to barge in the bathroom.

“What the fuck, Klaus!” Diego had not-yelped, and even if he had yelped, it would have been in a manly, booming voice. “Have you ever heard of personal space?”

“Nope, who is she? Sounds delightful,” he had said, sitting down on the tiles, legs crossed, laying against the wall and pulling a cigarette pack and a lighter out of seemingly nowhere, because there was no way these tight leather pants had pockets deep enough for any of it.

“And what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Diego repeated.

“Why, enjoying a nice chat with my brother dearest, of course.” He lit his cigarette, offered Diego one, to his disbelieving shake of the head. “And also hiding from Allison, who I may or may not have borrowed a t-shirt from that I may or may not have turned into a crop top.”

There was too much to comment on here. Diego picked just one thing to disapprove of. “You know, just because you died once and God kicked you off of heaven or limbo or wherever the hell she lives doesn’t mean you can’t be killed.”

“Yeah, I know, why the fuck do you think I’m hiding in there?” he mumbled around a mouthful of smoke.

Right. Onto the next thing then. “I thought you were sober.”

“I’m sober of drugs and alcohol,” Klaus said. “I’m not sober of the cigarettes I’m using to deal with the pain of being sober of everything else.”

“That seems like a healthy life choice.”

“Thanks!” Klaus beamed. “I think so too.”

Diego grunted, and almost started washing off his hair before he remembered that he was still stark naked and his brother was on his bathroom floor. “Doesn’t mean I’m not going to kick your scrawny ass out if you don’t leave in five seconds, though.”

“Just one minute,” Klaus pleaded, “so Allison doesn’t find me, and that way she’ll never figure out you’re the one using her shampoo.”

Diego stared at him. “Five.”

Klaus pouts. “Et tu, Brute?”

“Four.”

“Alright, alright,” he said, getting up and dusting off his precious pants from imaginary dirt. “I’m leaving, God, I really can’t catch a break in this fucking house-”

Diego could hear him bitching until he left the hallway, even though there was no one to talk to. He resolved that if one more person barged into the room he was in without knocking, he would finally put his knife-throwing skills to good use.

Of course, this was before Allison walked in looking for Klaus with a lot of angry hand gestures and intense glares, then Five, who was trying to teleport into Vanya’s room to show her a pretty snake he found and could we keep it please, and Vanya, hand covering her eyes because she was the only semi-decent person in this house, asking him to please come over and grab the snake to throw it out of the house but please, don’t kill it?

Which brings him back to today, fist tight around his kitchen knife, daydreaming about all the way he would stab Klaus with it and cracking up his mother’s brand new plate instead. 

“Wow. You do have anger issues,” Five says.

“You’re one to talk,” Diego points out.

“He isn’t wrong. You’re like, the world’s most murderous kitten,” Klaus says. “Tiny but deadly.”

Five smiles at him like a shark that tastes blood in the water, which shouldn't be scary as it is. But then Mom frets about her brand new table, and how precious cherry wood is these days, and they all look down in shame, even though Vanya is the one who broke the old table in the first place. Once again the inevitable result of their combined anger issues is foiled by a good maternal guilt-trip.

Diego still takes a shower after lunch, but not because anyone told him to, because he chose to, on his own. This time he makes sure to lock the door and put a chair behind it in case Klaus decides to get lucky lockpicking again. 

When he comes down, it’s two thirty, and Vanya looking uncomfortable in leggings that drag on the wooden floor and a sweater. 

“Vanya,” Five says on her other side. 

She startles. “Yes?”

“Why is  _ bootylicious _ written on your butt?”

Vanya’s horrified face is the one of someone who wishes she had died in the apocalypse instead of surviving to this day, and Diego sighs as he climbs back up the stairs to his room.

When he comes back down, she is explaining to Five that Allison wasn’t there to help, and Klaus didn’t own “sweatpants” because he didn’t believe in sportswear (which, as Five pointed out, raised a whole lot of questions about how he survived to be a half decent fighter, which they answered by concluding that he wasn’t, in fact, one) and before she could thank him and go to Allison’s closet anyway he mentioned that he did have something left over by an ex-girlfriend come to think of it, one thing leading to another, well.

“Catch,” Diego says as he throws clothes at her.

“Uh, thanks,” Vanya says, uncertain. “It’s…”

“My Umbrella Academy sports uniform pants from when I was fourteen. A fourteen-year-old boy and you are probably around the same size, so they should fit.”

“I... Don’t know if I’m supposed to be thankful or insulted,” Vanya says, “so I’m just going to go change now.”

He nods at her, and he is pretty sure there’s something like a smile on her face. 

Five watches him shrewdly. “You know, if you don’t start being more careful, I am going to start thinking you care.”

“In your dreams,” Diego says, and Five shrugs it off as he takes off for his lesson with Klaus. Diego is glad to be gone for that one. 

When Vanya finally gets down again, they walk to his car in silence, passing by the refined gardens and flowing fountains that always made him want to pee more than anything else.  They get in, and after a few more minutes of quiet, some guitar thrumming so low it is barely more than a background sound, she reaches for the radio and turns the music up. The rock station is on, and his fingers start tapping across the wheel of their own will as he pulls out the property, but he still thinks to say:

“Do you want to put on that classical channel crap you like?”

Diego really doesn’t want to - he has never cared much for classical music - and he doesn’t care what she listens to, but Mom has raised him well if anything. To his surprise, she answers that she doesn’t mind The Cure.

“Oh, crap,” he says, “I didn’t know you had taste.”

“I’m  _ literally _ a professional musician.”

“You know what I mean,” he says. “You play the violin.”

Vanya looks at him with a frown - nothing new here - before she asks, slowly, “You don’t remember, do you?”

“Remember what?”

“When we were twelve,” she says. “You used to want to become a rockstar, so you whined until Dad downloaded guitar lessons onto Mom.”

He does remember that, now that he thinks about it. He chuckles as he gets on the fast track. “Shit, he did. It was probably the first and only time he listened to me.”

“It was probably easier than you asking for a bazooka at ten,” she points out.

He snickers again. “You have a good memory. Guess all that writing paid out, in more than one way, uh.”

“I mean, yeah,” she shrugs. He glances at her, face faded against the backdrop of brick buildings flashing by, somehow both sheepish and unapologetic at the same time. “If I wanted people to take me seriously, I had to have at least a little introspection about our past. Gotta give them what they want, you know?”

“Yeah, come to think of it, I do remember that bazooka part. Might even have read it once or twice,” he says, making a harsh turn to the right. Some old woman with her son klaxons him, and he glowers at them until she stops. “I don’t remember the rock band being in any of our chapters, though.”

“Didn’t make the cut.”

“I guess it wouldn’t,” he says, and tries not to sound as bitter as he feels. 

She stops talking for a while, blissfully, and there’s only the music - another song yet, one Diego doesn’t know, all guitar strumming and  _ ooh _ ’s,  _ I’m a lonely boy, I’m a lonely boy - _ before she speaks up again, shy. “I remember you were terrible at it, and I kept sneaking into your room after dinner to help you out.”

“Yeah, of course you’d be a natural at that,” he snarks, distracted, because he can’t quite remember if he is supposed to turn left here or at the next stop sign to get to her place, and there’s a bike riding all over the car’s way. Jerk.

“It was the only time we ever acted like brother and sister,” she remembers, and she isn’t talking to him anymore, not really. “We said, when we would turn eighteen, we’d leave the Academy, leave everything, and join a rock band.”

“The Prime-8’s”, he remembers, and she stares at him, eyes dark and gleaming and focused on him once again. “None of the others would be allowed in, except Ben, because with his tentacles he’d be awesome at drums.” 

She snorts. “Oh right. We actually wrote down the rules, like, Luther and Allison are not allowed in the band, we shall only wear black, everything. I think he-” they all know who  _ he _ is “-he must have found them and thrown them out at some point, when he decided you were too bad at guitar to be allowed to play anymore.”

Diego smiles, but it tastes bitter and hollow in his mouth. “He told me to stop making these obnoxious sounds and focus on some other craft I could actually become good at. Never was very fond of fun, was he?”

That was how he started throwing knives. Now he remembers. It’s weird how some details of one’s past could slip away from memory, maybe forgotten forever, unless someone reminds you, or something. Sometimes he’d be watching a TV commercial and suddenly he’d see Eudora with perfect clarity, complaining about how sexist that movie was, and how objectifying the uniform of the female cop who ran around with the roguish rugged hero was, and that was without even breaching the subject of all the offenses to police regulations in the mere five shots they saw. Other times he would be eating something and remember the first time Mom made it, looking as unsure and nervous as her programming allowed her to. And then there are all the hours he spends lying in the dark staring at the ceiling of his car trying not to remember.

They listen to The Strokes until he manages to parallel park in her ridiculous little street.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> credits for Klaus being both a trash king and a food connoisseur come from this conversation with Louise
> 
> louise: okay but,,,, Klaus definitely has either trash taste in food like will eat a muffin someone stepped on or like .... five star taste because one of the many people he scammed for and shelter was super rich and fancy and boy developed a palate
> 
> me: bold of you to think he doesn't have both of these at any given moments
> 
> me: he ate a DONUT from the TRASH and complained about "store waffles" VS "diner waffles" in two episodes' time
> 
> which reminds me i forgot to credit @mrsgomemberg for betaing the first chapter even though she doesn’t even watch this show because she is the actual cutest so!!! love you babe! and louise is responsible for betaing this one and also giving me the validation i need to breathe and being an amazing source of the umbrella academy meta
> 
> i'm @vanya-hargreeves-apologist on tumblr if you wanna scream about the hargreeves siblings 
> 
> anyway kudos Fuel Me, i read every single comment as soon as it's posted and smile like a moron at my screen, so if you have the time and energy it's always nice!!!


	3. diego ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "yeah this is totally going to be just a one shot" - me, after writing chapter 1  
> congrats bitch you played yourself 
> 
> thank you louise!!!!!!!! i would die for You  
> also everyone who commented like i definitely would have given up after 5 pages of angst without the loveliness of your comments <3

Vanya’s apartment is - not exactly how he imagined it, because he never imagined it, but the type of place he would have expected her to live in, had he ever given much thought about it. The building she resides in isn’t nice by most standards, with no working elevator and a shabby paint job, but it is in a good part of town with old people and kids and guys with man buns riding bikes, far from the shady neighborhood Diego is used to. 

“Sorry about the smell,” she says, immediately walking towards the kitchen - because there’s a kitchen separate from her living room, wow, these book royalties really were everything, weren’t they - to empty out her fridge. 

Diego hangs back and looks around. The apartment is full of stuff, but feels weirdly empty, even with the huge library and its music books and fancy speakers, the cluttered desk, the empty white walls whose paint was starting to flake out. The place is almost monochromatic, all of shades of grey and dark wood except for a slightly more colorful blanket thrown over the big couch and baby blue curtains that softened the skylight. Vanya seems right at home there, camouflaged with her dark flannels and wardrobe in shades of grey.

He peers across the wide windows - the most evident emergency exit but also an obvious entry point for a potential threat - and says: “You know anyone can waltz in here if you don’t invest on some good shutters, right?”

“You should talk to Five about it,” she says from the other room. “He also has a lot of opinions on my very reckless habit of having windows.”

“Sure, ‘cause Five’s the only one with two brain cells in this house,” he mutters, sending a dark look to the street under him, scraping his knuckles against the glass - thick enough that she could watch the world spin but not hear the cars or people and that they in return couldn’t hear her practicing, probably also thick enough to keep people from breaking in unless they had the proper tools. 

He stands around awkwardly as she shoves some clothes and a lot of music sheets in a travel bag. It’s the most time they have spent alone together in years. 

 

Compared to the clear space of her apartment, the sweaty, dusty air of the gym is a pleasant return to what Diego knows. At three, next to nobody is there yet apart from a few women from their local biker gang training at the back, which was the goal. Not that Diego is ashamed of his sister, except for the fact that he is, and he has a street rep to keep that doesn’t include bringing uptight classical music players to fight clubs. 

He walks briskly to the punching bag in the back, nods in acknowledgment of the bikers who smirk and wave, and turns around to see Vanya trailing behind him, staring at them for a few seconds before she keeps her eyes resolutely glued to floor. She only raises up her head again when she gets to his level, watches everything around her with unease and curiosity, and it makes him feel somewhat safer than in her flat - they are on his territory now - and somewhat abashed. He imagines what she must see there, the huge ring that takes up half of the space in the room, the old black-and-white pictures inside cracked frames covering entire walls, the postcards plastered all over the countertop where they serve beers and take bets when the night comes, the tattooed ladies raising eyebrows at her. 

“What, scared of the big bad boxers?” he asks, not bothering to hide his smile.

“You wish,” she mutters, coming to stand next to him. “So, how do we do this? Do I, I don’t know, imagine this is Dad’s face and punch really hard? Are we supposed to listen to the Rocky soundtrack?”

“God, you really are a nerd,” Diego says, then crouches down next to his bag to fish something that sunk at the bottom of it, obviously. “The first thing you want to do is put these on.”

She peers at the gloves. “Oh. That’s anticlimactic,” she says, but takes them from him when he hands them over and slides them over her hands. They’re too big, like everything you want to loan to Vanya, but she fastens the straps as much as she can, and this will have to make do.

“So, usually, you’re supposed to do some light jogging to warm up-”

“I would rather die,” she cuts him.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought so too,” he says, looking pointedly at her scrawny, chicken legs. 

She frowns. “I’m athletic!”

“Sure you are.”

“I am! I have to hold a violin all day. I do have muscles. Biceps. Whatever the name of that thing in your forearms is.”

“Yes, forgetting the name of your muscles is the mark of any great athlete,” he deadpans. “Come over here, Usain Bolt. I’m showing you how to punch like you don’t come from the upper side of town.”

She comes over to stand at his right, and he shows her the parts of his hands, tells her to make sure the knuckles of her index and middle fingers are the one hitting the bag first so she doesn’t break anything, tells her about balance and good posture, straight wrists and tight elbows, and when he’s all done, he says: “Go on then, hit it.”

“What? Just like that?”

He puts as much disdain as he can in his eye roll. “No, of course not. But I’m not going to start explaining you the difference between a jab and a hook right now when there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’re breaking your precious musician wrists in the first five minutes anyway.”

“Great. Can’t wait,” she mutters, but she puts her arms up the way he taught her and starts hitting the way he told her. He waits for a dozen minutes, correcting her posture and hands just to be sure, before he stops her.

“Alright,” he starts. “Now you just got to stop being a pussy about it and hitting it like you’ve been in a fight once in your life.”

“Wow, way to be chauvinistic.”

He glowers. She throws a punch that is so weak it doesn’t even make the bag so much as tremble. Even the guys in the photo behind her seem ashamed. 

“God,” he says, “did you even try at all?”

“You know, you’re really not a very good teacher, like, at all,” she complains. 

“Then picture my face on that bag.”

“I thought you said no face picturing!” she protests.

“I lied,” he says. He thinks about the months he would hit a bag with her picture on it, the one from the back of her book, and chooses wisely not to mention it. Allison would wreck him.

She mutters something that sounds very not PG-13 of her, but she complies, punching a bit with a bit more strength, left, right, left again, until she stops. “This isn’t working,” she complains. “I’m not feeling very relaxed right now.”

He actually laughs at her face. “You think this is about feeling relaxed?”

“Isn’t it though?” she asks.

“Alright. You know what?” Diego says. “Let’s start again.”

“Sure.”

“What did you feel when you killed Harold or Leonard or whatever the fuck his name was?”

She startles. Looks around them with worry like the other attendants even care that she is in the same room as them. “Are you  _ crazy?” _

“Let’s be real, he was a real jerk,” he keeps going. “This slimy, snivelly type. Always lurking around. Do you think you’re even the first girl he screwed over like that? I mean, sure, he was in jail, but there are a good few years that don’t add up-”

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying. He only started dating you because he wanted you to use your powers. Because he wanted to be a part of the Academy - actually, you’re not so different on that point, are you? And then he’s the one who used you all along, tried to make you into his pet project, his superhero, but you’re no superhero, are you, Vanya-”

“Shut up.”

“He could have made you do anything, though. Always trailing behind him like some lost puppy. God, you were so desperate for someone to tell you you were special-”

“Shut  _ up,”  _ she spits out, and the lights of the gym flicker. The girls in the ring start whispering in worry. There is a lone car honking in the distance. Strong wind. And apart from that, silence, and the sound of Vanya’s labored breath coming in and out of her mouth, snarling.

“How about,” Diego says, standing behind the bag, holding it up in front of him, “you make me?”

The session is much more effective after that. 

She grunts and sweats and hits at the bag and cries out until her face is flushed and covered in sweat and the sun hangs low outside the gym. She only pauses twice, when she takes off her sweater, wet and ruined, and when he forces her to get some water inside her body. When she finally stops punching, she is out of breath, shivering and pale from the exercise. It is unsurprising: Diego is more shocked that she went on for that long with an untrained body and a clear lack of technique. He will have to teach her some kicks too, he thinks, and maybe some taekwondo so she can defend herself in ways that do not include explosions. This is a problem for later. 

She sits down, or, more accurately, lets herself fall down, then fumbles to cross her legs. He lowers himself to the ground next to her, sits, passes her the water bottle, that she empties out in short, desperate swallows. When her breathing finally evens out, he waits for her to say something - maybe a  _ thank you _ would be nice, though mortifying at the same time - but she just asks: “What time is it?”

Diego turns around to check on the big digital clock hanging high on the wall behind their back. “Five thirty. Gotta move it in about ten minutes.”

“Alright,” she says, and promptly falls down completely to lie on the ground, face up. 

He almost chooses the highway, but mocking her is just so easy. “What was it you said again? About how all that violin made you jacked?”

“Shut up,” she says, and she’s giggling and trying to catch her breath at the same time, and he’s laughing too. 

Vanya doesn’t thank him, and he doesn’t tell her it was fun, but they sort of make plans, in half-uttered words and emotionally stunted grunts, to do this again in two days right before her next appointment. When she wakes up the next morning, she is better rested than he has seen her in days. Five barely spares her a glance before he says: “Welcome to the very exclusive gang of Hargreeves children with anger issues, then.”

“Not exclusive if half of you morons are part of it,” Allison writes on her napkin, scrunches it into a ball, and throws it at his face. Her eyes are smiling. 

 

Diego is so used to reading Allison’s blocky letters that it feels wrong when he receives the invitation, all elegant cursive on thick, ivory paper.

He knows it has to happen eventually. He knows her sister made the entire process long enough, and that it should be hurried up in the week before all sorts of macabre changes happen, and all of these considerations are awful but he can’t stop thinking about it when he is waiting on a stakeout for the next psycho. The cult was a red herring all along, and though he put them in jail or in the hospital where they belonged, he is onto the bigger fish, a guy who calls himself the Magician. 

For some reason, it doesn’t make it either when he receives the confirmation, black on white.

“This came for you in the mail today,” Five says the next evening after he and Vanya came back. Vanya hurried up to get to the shower already, and that is how Five caught him alone, taking off his boots in the entrance. Klaus is hanging back against the doorway to the living quarters, his face serious in a very out of character way for him. 

“I don’t read mail,” Diego says automatically. “It’s either bills or people I went to police academy with getting married. I don’t need either of that crap.”

“Yeah, big guy, I think you’re doing to want to read that one,” Klaus says, quietly. That’s what makes Diego realize what it is about, the way Klaus talks, as if he were trying not to spook him. Klaus doesn’t care about not spooking anybody. 

Diego doesn’t need to open the envelope to know what is inside. He does so anyway. It is as if he was one of the characters in these horror movies Ben used to make them watch only to cry when the monster died, the ones who you know are walking towards something tragic and perfectly avoidable, but who do so anyway. He thinks for a second that he could just ignore the letter forever.

But he can’t, so he doesn’t. 

“I’m very sorry,” Five says. 

“Fuck off,” Diego tells him. 

When he leaves, he shoulders Klaus out of the way - he wants to get angry, to tell him it’s his fault for getting caught in the first place, to blame him, or Five, or dear old Dad, or whoever the fuck there is up there, but for some reason, for the first time in a long time, Diego feels like all the fight has gone out of him.

He doesn’t know how to fill up the space it left. 

 

Diego doesn’t make it to dinner that night, or to breakfast the next morning. He goes to pay a visit to the cult leader and beats him to a pulp, him and his damned high priestess. 

He only stops short of bashing her face in when he thinks of that fucking nonsense he told Klaus, _ yeah, I bet she would love for you to kill these guys in her name, _ Patch telling him that you could always get out, Vanya learning how to have a mean left hook instead of numbing herself, Allison with her throat cut and silent laughs and Luther with his constant sadness and the way he has started hiding his smile when Diego beats him at anything, Klaus soon sober all of two weeks and going, Eudora dead in that hotel room, bleeding out on some shitty carpet where a rich married guy got blown by a hooker three days ago, Five handing him the envelope, ivory not white, because white is for weddings, Eudora standing on top of that wrecked ship and telling him to stop being a baby and come reenact the Titanic with her, don’t they die at the end of that movie, Patch high kicking a guy because she thought maybe he might hurt Diego, having his back, breaking up with him, kissing him before she left on a mission, dying to save his brother that she didn’t even know because that was the kind of person she was.

Instead of bashing her face in, Diego turns her in to the police, goes to his car, drives to nowhere, and cries. 

 

Then he screams, because there’s a hand on his shoulder and he’s very busy trying to dislocate it from the arm it belongs to, and a familiar voice yelps and shouts.

“COME THE FUCK ON!” 

Diego stops in the process of crushing the guy’s knuckles to a pulp. “Klaus?”

“Yes, of course it’s me, you moron,’ his brother moans. “Who the hell else would be hiding on your backseat but me?”

“I don’t know,” Diego drawls out before he continues, voice getting louder as he does along, “maybe, oh, the fuckers I just put in jail five minutes ago?”

“Oh, right. Great job on that, really. Could you please let go of my hand now? I’d hate to go to the hospital and have them give me morphine and ruin all my good deeds of the last few days, really.”

Diego forces himself to untighten each of his fingers until Klaus can get back his hand, whimpering and blowing on it like it will magically cure it. Knowing Klaus and his luck, he might just find out about some brand new shiny power of his.

Some power of his.

“Hey, are you alright?” Klaus says, distantly, his voice drowned out by the droning in Diego’s ears. “I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen you cry since we were, like, eleven, and dear old dad told you you were shit at guitar, and-”

“Make her come back.”

Klaus pauses. Diego looks at him in the rearview mirror - catches sight of himself, eyes rimmed in red and bloodshot, cheeks glistening, and turns around instead - Klaus is every bit the deer in headlights, staring at Diego as if he was scared of him, as if he was sorry for him. As if he,  _ Klaus, _ was sorry for Diego. There is a surge of rage and embarrassment that swells up in him and withers up almost immediately.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Klaus says cautiously.

“You know exactly what I mean,” Diego says. 

Klaus pauses. “It’s true. I know exactly what you mean. I just… I’m not sure  _ you _ know what you mean.”

“Oh, trust me, I have my idea.”

Klaus is silent for a bit again, which is pretty fucking rich of him, to be silent now when he hasn’t shut up once since 1989. Finally he says: “Alright, if that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

“Alright.”

Diego doesn’t want to look at him anymore, so he looks at his side, out the window, at the lights of the crappy roadie dinner whose parking he rushed in, the trees all around them, the way their leaves shuddered in the early spring breeze, cold and dry, dark shapes cutting onto darker ones, the sky behind them, entirely clogged with clouds and human pollution, no stars. 

Klaus speaks up again. “You know, it might not work. I mean, it’s not like it’s an exact science. She’s probably fucking off wherever dead people go and not paying attention to us in the middle of a random Burger King copycat parking lot trying to conjure her up.”

“That’s what you said about Dad too, and you got the old son of a bitch, didn’t you?” Diego tells him, but what he really thinks is, _ she’s paying attention. I know she is.  _ He thinks _ I want to tell her I’m sorry about everything and I know she knew and I know it doesn’t matter anyway but I want to and I want to see her and I want her to be _ here.

They stay in the parking lot all night. She never shows up.

In the end, Diego punches a hole through his rearview mirror to avoid punching Klaus himself, and they drive back to the house with his hand bleeding all over his brand new carpet. Klaus doesn’t say anything else, just stays on his backseat and offers him cigarettes. Sometimes he whispers words Diego can’t quite hear and that aren’t meant for him. Only once does he understand something that sounds like  _ come on, talk to him, you can see he needs it, _ and he isn’t certain whether Klaus is talking to himself, Eudora, or someone else entirely. He isn’t even sure it is Klaus’ voice he hears.

 

Klaus helps him take off his boots, Diego’s bleeding hand numb and clumsy around the laces, and hovers by his side as he climbs up the stairs and crashes into his bed. Only then does he leave. It’s only to come back with Vanya at his side and an all-black emergency kit with an umbrella replacing the plus sign. Diego remembers Eudora patching him up - he remembers making a pun about her name that earned him an eye-roll and a sigh - and he remembers Vanya being trained by their father to help out around the menial work, cleaning wounds, timing them as they raced, jotting down statistics. 

“We thought we shouldn’t wake up Mom while she is recharging her battery,” Vanya says, apologetic.

“I don’t need your help,” Diego bites, but she only looks sorry for him too. She sits down on the bed and takes his hand into hers, winces at the sight of the charred mess that are his knuckles. She pulls out the burning alcohol and the tweezers.

Klaus sighs when she opens the bottle. “Is it weird if even that sounds like heaven to me right now?”

_ “Yes,” _ both Diego and Vanya say.

“God, thanks for the judgment,” he says, but he goes to sit on the windowsill anyway, opens it up a little to breathe the early morning air. 

At some point, pulling shards of glass out, Vanya opens her mouth as if to speak to him, but Diego glowers at her, and she decides against it. He can see her battling the impulse every few minutes until his hand is bandaged and she stands back up. She pinches her lips in what is supposed to be a smile, but doesn’t quite nail the landing, and says: “Do you want me to-”

“No.”

“Alright,” she says, putting her hand on the door handle. Then, softer: “Good night, Diego.”

She leaves, mercifully, but Klaus doesn’t. He stays at the windowsill watching Diego until, half asleep, half wanting to cry in peace, he tells him to fuck off, and Klaus moves away with silent, cat-like strides.

 

The next day is the day of the funeral and he wakes up at eight, after twenty-four hours of sleep, his tongue thick and foreign in his own mouth. They are all waiting for him downstairs, all dressed in black, something he doesn’t even notice at first, used as he is to see them dressed in formal clothes from the days of the Academy. He ignores Mom’s forced smiles, Luther’s eyes on him, Allison pointedly not putting the weight of her attention on him, even Klaus’ loud claps on his back. 

In the end, it’s Five who tells him first. 

“We’re going with you, Klaus and I,” he says, as matter-of-fact as Five always is. “The others are too conspicuous, between superstardom, mutations, and all the rest. And we’re the only ones who sort of knew her. So we’re the ones who are going. You’re going to bitch about it like a little baby, then you’re going to fight us on it, then you’re going to try to leave without us, but we’re going anyway.”

“Mom thinks you shouldn’t be alone,” Luther says. A cheap shot.

Diego looks up from his bowl to see everyone staring at him. Part of him wants to fight them on this again. Mostly, he’s just tired. “Sounds like you got me all figured out,” he says, numb, and gets back to his oatmeal.

Five pauses, confused. “Are you being like this just to prove me wrong?” he asks.

“Not everything is about you, Five,” Diego sighs.

“I-”

“Five,” Luther warns.

“Fair enough.”

 

(epilogue.)

After all they have been through, a quiet ceremony with family and friends under a sunny sky feels anticlimactic, but maybe that is just the way life is. Or death. 

The police academy gives a very beautiful wreath. Diego came empty handed and feels silly, but Five only nods at him and Klaus goes back in the car to return with a ridiculously big, yellow pile of flowers that she would have hated. Diego nods and thinks he is still fucking with her even from above the grave. It’s almost comforting.

He almost doesn’t stay for the service, because he sets a foot inside the church hall and the stench of candles burning, incense, and death starts choking him. His fists tighten desperately and he itches for a knife or a fight and the crowd is overbearing and his breathing is labored, difficult, but Klaus helps him loosen his tie, fingers cold against his clammy skin, and then shoves it unceremoniously inside his pocket. The moron is wearing a quilt for some obscure reason - he says  _ it could be an Irish funeral,  _ and Diego tells him  _ you’ve seen Eudora, you know she was Latina, _ and Klaus says  _ it doesn’t have to mean anything, don’t be racist _ \- and Diego focuses on how annoyed that makes him to forget the everything around them. Five does all the conversation, acting the part of a concerned yet adorable baby brother. They make it through the ceremony by sitting outside on the marble stairs in the shade of the entrance listening distantly to the voices that wobbled from the inside, Klaus chainsmoking, Five attentive, Diego lost.

Diego doesn’t listen to anything the priest says, but, as Five reports to him later, it was lovely, though a little impersonal - overall a very decent eulogy, given the circumstances. There must be around three dozens people in the little church, mostly friends, but some people that she helped on cases too, coming up to the altar and talking about how she changed their lives. His heart swells up in pride and mourning when he slides his head in between the doors and recognizes a girl in her early teens who they accompanied through a case back when she was, what, eleven or twelve. Now she stands tall and a little shy with plaited hair and a black dress, reading a poem by a Eudora Stone Bumstead that she thought was the same Eudora back when she was a kid and met Patch, because she didn’t know any better. He closes his eyes when she starts reciting,  _ the sun has gone from the shining skies, _ he opens them and she is gone and one of Eudora’s few relatives has taken her place, not without passing on an opportunity to throw the stink eye at Diego’s head peeking out the doors - her relatives never did like him much, but the feeling was mutual anyway. 

He doesn’t give a speech. Even if he had stayed inside, she wouldn’t have expected him to.

They walk. The sun burns Diego’s back, makes the entire procession sweat through their fancy Sunday clothes, and even once they arrive, he has to squint to see the hole in the ground. Everything is too bright and too blurry and too colorful, grass greener than he has ever seen it, and he hates every bit of it, and Eudora would have liked it, so, guess nothing about this makes sense anyway. 

He throws dirt over the coffin - stupid tradition, never got it - and joins Klaus and Five to hang out at the back of the crowd. They’re arguing, because of course they are.

“Listen,” Klaus starts, “I’m not telling you that you should collect numbers at your sister-in-law’s funeral-”

“She and Diego weren’t married- wait,” Five pauses, “were they?”

“-I’m just saying that this girl totally wanted to tap all that Hargreeves charisma, which, of course, why wouldn’t she? We  _ are _ very charming.”

“I’m fifty-eight.”

“You’ve spent like,” Klaus says, “forty years of that being alone, so don’t pretend you’re all grown up and emotionally mature, you’re just as emotionally stunted as the rest of us. Also, you’re technically thirteen, and I remember what it’s like being thirteen.”

“I am begging you to please stop talking.”

“Because you know I’m right,” Klaus says, triumphant.

“No, because stabbing you at a funeral would just be bad form,” Five says through gritted teeth.

“So, when I talk about bringing knives to a funeral, it’s scandalous and I was raised by wolves, but if it’s you it’s OK?” Diego asks behind them, making them startle. Trained assassin my ass.

“I mean, one of us is likelier to stab someone on impulse,” Five says.

“Which one?” Klaus asks. “No, I’m legitimately asking, which one of you is that supposed to be?”

Five whips around to glare at him, mouth gaping, and Diego almost smiles. He turns around one last time to look at the hole in the ground where they buried Eudora as if she could be contained to anything that down-to-earth. The sun blinds him again, and when he squints, eyes watering, he could swear someone who looks just like her is staring at him.

He knows what they say about ghosts, so he doesn’t blink, doesn’t say anything to Klaus, waves his hand at her and hope he is not going crazy. In any case, it’s not like the crazy in his family doesn’t get company.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always my tumblr is @vanya-hargreeves-apologist and if you leave kudos or comment on this i will cry at work while reading it because i'm that kind of weak bitch please do so anyway


	4. five i

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey, are you alright?” Vanya asks, hands around her cup of coffee and hair in disarray.
> 
> “I need more coffee,” Five tells her. 
> 
> Allison slides him a note from across the table, and his fuzzy, sleepy eyes take a bit too long to focus on it - “You know it’s is a salad bowl you’re pouring coffee into, right?” 
> 
> “Our breakfast bowls aren’t big enough,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for this chapter like most others i had the PRIVILEGE of being betaed by actual 58-year-old depressed assassin in a younger body louise,,,, whose commentary is amazing and if you could read it with this chapter it would be way better
> 
> ngl i had a very hard time writing this one, because i adore five but also like... he is not the sort of characters i usually write.... so i'm a bit ugh about this part. but all of your lovely comments on the last chapter were what made me keep writing so thank you so so much for them!!!! i'm so grateful
> 
> final note: there are a lot of references to pretentious books (bc i'm pretentious) and music that can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7pxwaBsTme77KubD43ewlG

It is only on his third week back from the future that Five starts to see the patterns again.

To be fair, he spent the first week fighting the coming of the apocalypse, so he did not have much spare time to think. Then, well, there were his first two lessons with Klaus, and Patch’s funeral, and Luther and him meeting men in costumes and promising them their sister was no threat to anyone (Five doing most of the lying through their teeth and Luther playing the part of the earnest, good-hearted soldier). And that’s not with counting Allison’s repeated attempts to get him out of the house for obscure reasons he could not get into.

Then, time starts to slow again, and he starts to see things he didn’t before. Little ones, details, barely even there, that stretch forever in his head. Doubts.

This is how he ends up scraping his knees as he crouches in his uniform shorts over the splintered floor of Pogo’s mess of a room, hidden under the oak desk with a lamp torch in hand, foraging through a pile of papers he doesn’t have time to understand.

He catches words like cues - names of his brothers and sisters, equations that would make even his own brain hurt, hazards - and shoves whatever grabs his attention under his shirt, feeling like he is back under the Handler’s piercing, Big Brother eyes once again.

“Now, Five,” a woman’s voice says, “what do you think you’re doing here?”

Five yelps when he sits upright all of a sudden and hurts his head. His eyes well up with tears, undignified, but then there is a soft hand on his cheek and someone tutting at the bump, and thank God, it’s-

“Hi Mom.”

“Honey,” she says, half scolding. “What did we say about snooping into people’s things?”

He smiles, fake and sweet. “I’m sorry, I know I should have asked Pogo, but there is this document Luther and I need to see, and he’s not home right now, so I thought, for this once, I could look for it?”

His voice rises more high pitched at the end of that sentence, and he sounds so thirteen-year-old right now he could gag, except this is exactly what he is aiming for. Especially when he is sitting at midnight in the middle of a sea of scientific documents in Pogo’s tiny, crowded office, full of test tubes and scraps of metal and a threatening doctor’s chair which Five is painfully aware is where Luther died and then breathed again, because Reginald Hargreeves was not your usual failed Frankenstein.

This is a compromising position, but Five has known worse.

“Well,” Grace says, slowly, her hand still on his face, face as open and trustful as ever. “It’s alright, sweetheart, I won’t bother Pogo about it. It can be our little secret, can’t it?”

Nailed it.

“Yes, I guess it can,” Five says, beaming. He would feel guilty about the way Mom’s eyes crinkle when she smiles back, but let’s be honest here, he has done much, much worse.

At dinner one sleepless night later, Grace puts one perfectly manicured finger over her lips and winks. Nobody else notices, all busy talking about Vanya’s absence from the table tonight, which, when one remembered she used to run away for entire days without anyone noticing, Five thinks is rather ironic.

Five winks back at her. He doesn’t tell anyone about it and excuses himself early to peruse over the files he managed to steal away. He doesn’t think about it twice: it’s not like it is the only thing he doesn’t talk to his siblings about.

Five doesn’t talk about the nightmares or the not sleeping, about Delores or how he swears he can see Ben hanging around the corner of the room sometimes, so quick he is gone every time Five whips around, but most of all, Five doesn’t tell anyone that when he wakes up, gets downstairs for breakfast and about a gallon of coffee, and he first looks at his siblings’ faces, there is a scary, disorienting moment when he barely recognizes them.

Then again, this sort of problems is what the gallon of coffee is for.

In the morning, everything in the manor is strange and alien, and the new furniture Grace is using to fill up the empty spaces left by Sir Hargreeves or time traveling assassins brawl or Diego’s latest workout program are dark shapes lit up by sunlight too blueish and pale to let anything feel real again. In the shade, his brothers and sisters are half-strangers haunting his childhood house, but Five doesn’t tell them so.

“Hey, are you alright?” Vanya asks, hands around her cup of coffee and hair in disarray, while Five stares at Luther incredulously - he isn’t sure what he expected to see but seven foot of bulging muscles and hands like barrel lids weren’t it. It has been a week since he came back, sure, but he can’t seem to get used to any of it.

In times like these, he usually focuses on Vanya, whose picture on the back of her book was his only company for decades, apart from Delores; Vanya who apart from the shorter hair, threat to society and lack of uniform, isn’t all that different from when she was thirteen - though she would very much hate him telling her that. And considering what almost happened at the dinner table not even two days ago, Five would rather not piss her off so soon.

But then, sometimes, even Vanya feels wrong. Like a song slightly out of tune. And he doesn’t know why, and he isn’t sure how to figure it out, and there is something bad coming, he can feel it, keeping him awake at night, staring up at his ceiling, remembering all that happened in the past two weeks, wondering what he missed.

“I need more coffee,” Five answers instead.

Allison slides him a note from across the table, and his fuzzy, sleepy eyes take a bit too long to focus on it - “You know it’s is a salad bowl you’re pouring coffee into, right?”

“Our breakfast bowls aren’t big enough,” he says.

She frowns at him, and Luther opens his mouth like he is about to reprimand him on his coffee consumption, but Five glares at him and he wavers. Guilt-ridden Luther is so much easier to get along with than leader Luther, in Five’s informed opinion. Of course, it’s probably only a matter of days before he returns to his big brother mode, but damn it if Five isn’t going to make the most out of them.

It is probably only thanks to this - and Allison’s muteness, and Klaus’ terrible sleeping patterns, but hey, what can you do - that Five gets a quiet breakfast. No bickering. No worrying. No talking. All in all, maybe the almost-apocalypse was for the best.

 

The mornings are weird, but during the day, Five forgets. How easy it is to get caught up in the way they are all living in the mansion together again, except for Number Six, poor old Ben, even his statue long gone. Five has known about his death for decades, but it is different to be around the others all day long, achingly familiar and so different all the same, after all this time, and knowing Ben will always remain the way he last saw him.

Then again, considering how they all turned out, maybe it’s for the best.

“Oh my god, Five. Five. Fiive.”

“What,” Five snaps. Klaus is looking up at him from where he is sitting on the floor, very much not focusing on his Ouija board. But it’s alright. It’s fine. It’s not like Klaus asked him to help him harness his power, insisted for an hour, really, until he said yes, and then turned out to be as uncooperative and bothersome as an especially dumb raccoon with undiagnosed ADHD.

It’s fine. Five has known worse. He just isn’t sure he’s known more annoying.

“You know what I just realized,” Klaus asks.

“That your fingers started moving on that board and the ghost of Leonardo da Vinci magically appeared?” Five says. “Because if this is not what happened, I really don’t want to know.”

Klaus snorts. “Listen, trust me, if good old Leo appeared, telling you really wouldn’t be the first thing on my mind.” He makes a truly obscene gesture with his fingers and Five automatically shuts his eyes before remembering that he is, in fact, fifty-eight years old. “No, this is even _better.”_

Five sighs. Again. Finally, he asks: “If you tell me about it, do you swear you’ll try seriously this time?”

“Why do you assume I’m not trying serious- you know what? Alright. I swear,” Klaus says, one hand over his heart, the other laying flat on the Ouija board, “on the spirit of our beloved, dear late father.”

“Sure, because that means so much to you,” Five deadpans.

“Alright,” Klaus says, ignoring him. “Sit down. You’ll need it.”

Five complies reluctantly, dragging a chair towards the Ouija board he spent days searching in the mansion’s old, junk-filled attic. Klaus leans towards him, conspirational, and Five makes sure to roll his eyes as emphatically as he can.

“So, you know how you came back to our time, right?” Klaus begins, a crazed look on his face.

“Sure.”

“But the moment you were in before you came back-”

“November 1963, the president’s assassination.”

“Sure, sure,” Klaus handwaves, “whatever. It was in the past, right? So the time we’re in right now, at the time, it was the future.”

“Does this have a point at all?” Five says, getting halfway up, ready to leave.

“You are,” Klaus says, pausing for dramatic effect. “Literally. Back to the Future.”

Five stops. He stares at Klaus, sitting in someone else’s black skirt on their old dining room’s wooden floor in between the empty freezer and the shelves full of useless junk, his mouth opened in a perfect O shape, his eyes wider and bluer than ever.

Klaus mimics an explosion with his hands.

“Find yourself another teacher,” Five says, and walks away from the room.

Klaus starts laughing then, that hysterical laugh of him that shows all of his teeth and makes him look more than a little deranged, curls of hair falling all over his brow, cheekbones prominent.

“Come on, come back, it was _funny._ You know it was, _”_ he starts babbling, and Five, halfway out of the threshold already, doesn’t even listen to him, so used to his brother talking in empty circles to vacant rooms - it wasn’t like Klaus ever shut up. “Welcome the truth into your heart, Five! Embrace your narrative!” A beat, and then: “Ah, _you_ think it was funny, don’t you? Oh, right. What do you know about fun anyway?”

Five stops.

“You know, I don’t need your judgment. I don’t have to stand around and listen to this abuse-” Klaus stops again like he is listening to someone else’s answers. “Oh, you think I wouldn’t? Try me, bitch.”

Suddenly, Five remembers.

He remembers Klaus’ shiftiness: not only in the way he would hide the tremor of his hands with long sleeves, or the sweaty anxiousness that followed him around ever since he stopped popping pills left and right, but his stare avoiding everyone else’s, or following imaginary shadows around the room; his random barks of laughter that they collectively ignored because they took his weirdness for a given; his theatrical asides; his obvious lies.

Five hesitates for a few seconds before he walks back to the room, slides a curious head in between the doorframe, only the upper half of his body into the kitchen, asks: “Who are you talking to?”

Klaus’ head whips around to meet his eyes and takes a bit too long before he snorts. “Why, my imaginary friend, of course. Tall man in a bunny costume? You might have, you know, not seen him before.”

Five squints before he catches himself and smiles at Klaus. “Yes, of course, silly me,” he says, and starts walking back out as he calls out: “Class dismissed!”

He doesn’t bother with waiting for Klaus’ answer or climbing up the stairs; when Five appears in his bedroom, he already has a list in his mind of people Klaus could be talking to in his head and a pencil in his hand, pulling out an old notebook from its hiding place under the creaky floorboard he ripped out when he was ten and decided that maybe Reginald Hargreeves didn’t have to know everything.

Reginald Hargreeves. Yet another name. Unlikely of course - Klaus would rather overdose yet another time than talk to their father - but you never know.

Five isn’t paranoid. He is careful. There is a difference, he thinks while he underlines The Handler three times, draws a little arrow to _both were in vietnam?_ and _has a motive_ ; there is a difference, he just doesn’t remember what it is.

 

This sort of events is how Five is reminded he is not thirteen and in a constant battle for his father’s attention anymore. Sometimes it’s something small, nothing at all really - Allison talking about her daughter heartbroken over coming fourth place at her science fair, or Klaus showing off an old tattoo he got in India on some sort of weird hedonistic spiritual trip he took at twenty-one (which Five suspects is coded language for his sugar daddy paying for his vacations, damn him if he is going to judge), or Diego talking about an old case, or complaining about his back pain.

This is when Five is reminded of how much older they all are now. They are so different as adults from who they were at thirteen, as they are bound to be. The forty-five years between now and when he last saw them are long, but in many ways, it feels like the seventeen years separating them are even longer.

Five doesn’t know if he even seems changed to any of them, in comparison.

“Well, you’re even more annoying,” Diego answers when Five asks him. They are standing in the living room, Diego getting ready to leave (which seemed to involve strapping even more knives to his body costume, somehow: maybe that was his real power), Klaus lounging languidly over the couch while he waits three hours for the clock to ring at six in the afternoon so they could go to the movies. There is a new superhero movie Five reluctantly agreed to see with Klaus. He is already regretting that decision. But not any more than he regrets asking Diego anything as his brother adds: “And dramatic. Somehow. So there’s for the Guinness World Records.”

 _“Ha._ You’re one to talk,” Klaus says, “Diego ‘The Kraken’ Hargreeves.”

“It’s my boxing name!” Diego protests. “I needed one!”

“The Kraken,” Klaus repeats. “Diego, you do realize one of our brothers has tentacles, right?”

“Had,” Five corrects, and Klaus glances sideways as he winces. It ticks Five off. It is one of the many, many things that do - Klaus glancing sideways where no one is standing; Vanya’s silences, her glares into nothingness, her stay in Allison’s room, whispering, conspiring; even Luther and Diego sometimes…

Five can feel imaginary, tiny ants crawling over his skin. He shakes it off.

“I can breathe underwater,” Diego is telling Klaus by the time Five stops staring at their usual tells.

“Oh, right,” Five says. “And when has that ever been useful to anyone, ever?”

Diego sputters indignantly and starts talking about a mission he went on once with Luther that involved saving the Swazi princess from a group of Somalian pirates, indignant, but Five cuts him with: “But weren’t you already out of the Academy in 2007?”

“Yeah, _Kraken,_ weren’t you out of the Academy in 2007?” Klaus repeats.

“Shut the f-fuck up,” Diego says, and he gives them his best glower as he storms out. At least he hasn’t tried to throw hands with them this time, which counts as a win for anger management.

Still laying over the couch with his legs swung across the arm of the chair, head bent awkwardly, Klaus cackles like a maniac and holds up his hand for a high five that Five considers for a few seconds before he decides to dignify it with a fist bump.

“Classic,” Klaus sighs, entirely too happy with himself. He leans back in the couch and, after a few seconds, he is out like a light, still smirking. No idea where that guy stayed last night, but it definitely wasn’t the mansion. (Not suspicious, Five decides, just Klaus.)

Five stays still, sitting down only for a few minutes before he stands up from the armchair, walks a few feet, realizes he doesn’t know where to go, sticks around in the middle of the room, aimless. He considers going to see Vanya, but ever since she was let out of the box, she has stayed holed up in Allison’s room, letting their sister take care of her as if she were a teenager with a bad cold.  Delores is back home. Diego is wherever Diego goes in the afternoons, and Luther left to speak with a few men in suits - Five has written down notes for him that he isn’t sure Luther will follow but he hasn’t gone with, because the government isn’t ready to get schooled by a thirteen-year-old about the Apocalypse. It seemed like a good idea at first to let Luther handle it, in his quality as Number One, but now Five has nothing to do but wander around and worry they are going to take his sister away, unsure of what to do next even if they don’t.

So he does what anyone with sense would do in his position and goes to get a book in the library.

Somehow, the wall-to-wall bookshelf surrounding the room seems to have grown even bigger and denser since Five left. Somehow, he still roams through the shelves and finds nothing. Although to be fair, he did have a lot to time to read back when the world ended, so it is not all that surprising.

His fingers graze against the S section: _Being And Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology_ , J-P. Sartre: he has gotten enough lessons about free will for a lifetime; _The World as Will and Representation,_ A. Schopenhauer: if he wanted a suicidal German to tell him nothing matters and life sucks he would wake Klaus up; _The Philosophy of Time Travel,_ R. Sparrow: actually a pretty good read, but he burnt through it too many times while making his calculations. Sartre makes him think of Heidegger though - _Being and Time,_ a nice book to put one to sleep - and he walks to the other side of the room to get back to the H section of the library, crouches, almost picks up Heidegger when he notices it.

 _Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven_ stands tall in the middle of the other books, uncreased spine laughing at him, and he doesn’t think twice before he grabs it and returns to the living room.

Even though they are in April, he lights a good fire in the old fireplace before he settles down and opens the book.

If Five hadn’t read Vanya’s book, he would have never known what to do with the people next to him today. It is not like he had a lot of things to hold onto in the Apocalypse, so everything he had was cherished - almost no clean clothes, all of the books he could salvage from the Academy and their local libraries, pencils and a blackboard he miraculously found in the razed and bloody remnants of a primary school (that was a fun trip), a handful of stuffed animals he liked to pretend he had adopted, and Delores, of course, though he would never dare refer to her as a possession: Delores is a strong supporter of the women’s liberation movement. Even with so little, _Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven_ was one of his most prized possessions. Now that he is back, he sets to reread it - it’s been almost twenty-eight years since he last did it from cover to cover, and without the highlights and dog-eared pages of his old copy (Luther’s, in fact, but it wasn’t like he was there to claim it), every word feels like a fresh start.

In spite of how cynical its tone is, biting and pessimistic in a way that made his first impression of thirty-year-old Vanya more of a dull surprise, an _oh, yes, that makes sense,_ it offers plenty of insights. “Luther cares more about being a hero than anything else”, “Diego’s independence has always put him at odds with our father and the other siblings,” “drifted apart”, “craves attention”, “so sweet and vulnerable”, “became cruel”, “our father experimented on him the most, and it changed him”, “so eager to please Dad”, “dragged into their games”, “let him die”.

(That one had hurt the most. Apart from Vanya, Ben was maybe the one he was closest to back then. He remembers first reading it, the bile rising up in his throat, closing the book and rushing to the nearest puddle, dry heaving because he hadn’t eaten anything in two days, skin clammy and throat raw, and if he closes his eyes he’s almost there again, in the middle of the destroyed Academy, he can feel the ashes in the air weighing down on his skin like it always did back then, the smell, worst of all, but you get used to it, and-

It takes him every ounce of strength in his frail body to breathe. The normal, slightly musty air of the mansion. The smell of old books opened for the first time in a long time. Even Klaus’ scent, the perfume he stole from Allison and the whiffs of nicotine that followed him around. Five breathes. He is not having a panic attack right now. He has survived the fucking Apocalypse and starting puberty - _twice._ He has lived through worse than bad flashbacks.

He breathes, and counts up to seven, then starts again, until he stops smelling the burnt bodies of his family.)  

The book is good. Useful. If anything, it helped Five understand how things got so messed up. Or how they always were - the jury is still out on this one.

Five reads. Around him, Klaus’ loud snores and the crackling of the fire keep him grounded. This is real. This is what is real. This is the timeline he is in right now.

“Oh”, Vanya says when she gets downstairs, socked feet somehow silent on the creaky wooden stairs, and catches sight of him reading her book, page 394 and going strong. “I forgot you’d read it.”

“Your prose is still a bit rough around the edges, but your imagery is very creative,” Five tells her. “I think it’s a very solid first book.”

“Uh. Thanks, I guess.”

“Have you ever considered writing more? You definitely have enough for a sequel now, at least, but maybe fiction would be of interest to you. I heard sublimation does wonder for your mental health.”

Vanya just looks at him, puzzled. Behind her, Allison is caught somewhere between amusement and reprobation. They stick around for a bit, and the overwhelming stench of Allison painting her nails a deep purple is disgusting but familiar. Klaus bickering with her so that she paints his as Vanya gets up to open a window is even more so.

Still, there is an uneasy weight on his stomach, shaking with his every move, and everything they do feels offkey, fake in some way Five can’t quite pinpoint.

His eyes are on Vanya like a hawk.

 

Whenever Allison is off to have her own life instead of burying Vanya under borrowed clothes and worry and affection - though her version of having her own life still involves burying Vanya under a lot of worry and affection - Vanya climbs down the long winded stairs and stays with Five for a while. Sometimes there are more people, like when Klaus is awake at the same time as them, or when Allison sticks around with her to watch a movie she swears is a classic, or Diego is either nursing an injury because Mom’s worry finally got to him or napping on the couch like an old man, or Luther sits with them, always hesitant, unsure of what to do with his time when he is not on a mission. But often, it is just the two of them, and it is like being a child all over again, when they spent most of their time together, Vanya sneaking into his room and whispering completely trivial matters as if they were secrets so Dad wouldn’t hear and scold her for distracting her brother. Five used to confide in her too, telling her of his plans in eloquent, dramatic sentences, which he cannot help to look back to as childish fantasies.

Now, apart from all of this, their time together is mostly quiet, Vanya sitting with her legs thrown over the back of the couch and her head down, reading a novel by some Russian writer, because they have enough in the library with Tolstoi alone to go around for months without needing any other book.

 _“Crime and Punishment,”_ Five reads with a small laugh. “Sounds like an appropriate read.”

Vanya doesn’t even look away from reading her book for a second as sort of lopsided half-smile grows on her face. Five almost forgot how much he missed Vanya’s snarky, dry sense of humor. “I mean, I was being polite and leaving _The Idiot_ to you.”

“Oooh, burn,” Klaus says from the entrance, throwing on a scarf (big, crimson, definitely not his) and telling them not to wait up tonight, which probably means he is going to see a Pixar movie and get an extra large popcorn he would only eat one half of - sober life was treating him well sometimes. (Five would check the ticket stub later that night. Not because he wants to intrude on his brother’s privacy, he tells himself, just because he had to make sure.)

Then they both read for the duration of the evening in companionable silence, only breaking it when one of them has reached a particularly savory passage of his or her book and wants to share with the other. It is pretty much the pinnacle of human interactions to Five.

This is how their time together usually goes; either that or, sometimes, he gets tired of the quiet in his room, and his thoughts become too loud and his notebook is filled with half-thoughts he crossed out and conspiracy theories, and he gets to her room while she is practicing and listens to her play. (She never used to play for them. She was scared. He remembers reading that in her book - the constant mixture of anguish and hope, _would today be the day I engaged Allison? Or would I stand up to Diego’s taunts? Maybe I’d show Five the violin piece I’d been working on for weeks._ It’s too bad - but if he is honest with himself, he is not sure preteen Five would have cared. To be fair, he didn’t care about much except for time travel and robots.)

More rarely, Vanya is the one who comes into his room, knocking softly, usually bearing snacks and a cup of coffee, as if she had to make up for being here in the first place. He tells her she doesn’t have to do that, one day, and she looks surprised as she says that she knows she doesn’t - that she wants to.

And, in between all of that, Five keeps an eye on her.

He tries not to be too philosophical about it, _who watches the watchmen,_ doesn’t even make notes about her whereabouts and progress, because that would feel too much like his father, but he does write down what annoys her and what calms her, what are the things that make her feel angry and bitter and small and the ones that bring her joy. One part of his lists is depressingly empty.

 

There are times he doesn’t seek out Vanya when his thoughts get too loud and he remembers lifetimes.

(On an impossibly sunny day, the clammy warmth seeping through their all-black costumes and laughing at them, Five and Klaus went to the funeral with Diego. Five watched his brother struggle to eat dinner because his throat was too tight, until he excused himself from the table, despite Mom’s worry. He wondered if all the people he killed have had the same sort of funerals too.

He tries not to think too much about it.

Instead, he focuses on something else, considers his brothers’ reaction. He wants to declare Diego above suspicions, but the wrongness in his stomach grows heavier every day.)

 

Five keeps taking notes, like how Luther walks around the mansion as if he were a passerby who got lost in his way out. Luther goes to meet officials a lot in these first weeks: special services explaining that they can’t let a walking nuclear bomb hanging around town like this (as if Allison was any less dangerous behind her painted lips; as if they weren’t all threats to public safety); the city mayor explaining that someone has to pay for the damage done to a perfectly good house midtown; more men in costumes, always men in suits. It was easier when their father did it. God, it would be even easier had Allison still had her power. But she doesn’t, and so Luther meets them and puts on his best costumes and acts as if he was sir Reginald Hargreeves himself, because he is Number One after all.

Him and Pogo have late night conversations that Five regularly joins. He might not know the various interchangeable men in costumes the way they do, but he knows administration (an intertemporal one, sure, but that special brand of both ruthlessness and inefficiency is the same) and he understands things that neither Pogo nor Luther can. It takes time, but eventually, it will all die down - the meetings are growing sparser already.

Five decides that Luther is decidedly acting weird, but understandably so, considering the circumstances.

 

Allison on the other hand is, he thinks privately, the one who changed the most. There is little left of the preteen girl she used to be, and, from what he heard from the others, even less of the teenager. She has grown softer around the edges, kinder, and when she smiles she doesn’t bare her teeth like she used to, all of hunger and ambition.

They never used to get along much. Not that they didn’t like each other - they just didn’t have all that much in common. He wondered about it sometimes, because he had nothing but time to think about these things while he was wandering around. Back in the Apocalypse, Five walked a lot. There wasn’t really anything to move around but his feet - cars tended to explode when violently thrown into buildings by meteorites, and no one was left to operate the underground stations that weren’t buried under in the carnage, after all - and he would get fed up with equations after a while. He remembers seeing signs laying down or still up on half-ruined buildings, some of them familiar, yellow arcs of a McDonald’s he never got to eat at, or stores he heard of, some of them mysterious, green and dusty, calling to him, mermaids smiling as if they knew secrets he did not.

To say Five is surprised when he first goes to a Starbucks would be an understatement.

Allison is the one who takes him there. One day she comes to get him at what he says is dawn and what she says is seven in the morning and asks him, finger tapping impatiently against the blocky words on her notebook, “Wanna go get coffee?”

His first reaction, of course, is to throw a pillow at her, but then he has no pillow to lie on, and she’s already ripped out his covers in retaliation for no reason at all apart from plain, sadistic cruelty, and he guesses it’s not like he has anything better to do with his day.

“I hate you,” he still tells her, but he is sitting up on his bed and no amount of frowning can compete against Allison’s nonchalance as she turns the page and there it is, all ready for his answer, “Sure you do. Meet me downstairs in 20”.

She leaves his room in a breeze of fresh air and Coco Mademoiselle. He goes to his closet, opens it, and says out loud, “Oh, but what to wear? Alas, the torments of uncertainty are killing me,” before he remembers Delores isn’t here anymore to hear his perfect deadpan delivery, grabs the nearest uniform and leaves to brush his teeth.

Five is careful to tie a proper Windsor knot as his father had insisted on teaching them, barking in reprobation the day Klaus showed up with a Van Wijk like some sort of jaunty, devil-may-care sixties’ show host. He is with Allison waiting when Five gets down, still in last night’s clothes and eyeliner, but smelling like sweat and streets more than alcohol, which is actually pretty encouraging. They are peering over the latest _Vogue_ , providing what Five is sure is insightful commentary, Klaus sitting cat-like on the arm of the chair Allison occupies. Her face is plastered over the magazine on an ad for the perfume she is wearing, except her face doesn’t look like her, which is weird, but is apparently a very ordinary occurrence for everyone else.

When Five greets Allison, his brother yawns without covering his mouth, tells them to wait up for him in the car and leaves to go upstairs and get changed. Five doesn’t pay it any heed.

This is when Five should be getting suspicious. In hindsight, he will blame his foolishness on his half-asleep bleariness.

“Where are we going?” Five asks Allison, but she only shrugs. “Is this a kidnapping? Because I must tell you, out of all of us, I am pretty sure you would have more luck kidnapping Klaus. You only have to tell him there is candy in your white truck and he will eat out of your hand. Look how many times he has gotten kidnapped already.”

Her lips quiver as she slides in the driver’s seat (Five is not allowed to drive until he is legal, they declared. There was a vote and everything. He doesn’t care about the vote or their rules, but if they are in the car with him he at least has to pretend he does) and she writes, big letters on her blank page, “1?”

“Still one more time than any of us,” he says. She raises her eyebrows at him. “Alright, still one more time than any of us except you, but in your defense, all the supervillains used to think you’d be easier to detain because you were the girl of the group.”

Allison snorts, and he almost does too, because god, how _wrong_ were they. From what he has been told, they never even learnt from others’ mistakes. Morons.

Behind him, a door opens and closes, and he startles and starts feeling his pocket for a weapon, but then a hand claps his shoulder and Klaus’ uniquely annoying voice says, “Yay, roadtrip!”

“What are you doing here?” Five asks him.

“What, I’m not allowed to want to spend time with my baby brother?”

They just stare at him until he throws his hands in the air and lies back on the backseat, and says, “Fine, I wanted to hitch a ride to the- wherever you’re going, alright.”

“You know you could drive yourself,” Five offers. “Since you’re so sober now.”

“Come on. You _know_ I can’t drive,” Klaus answers.

Five looks at him suspiciously for a few more seconds, Klaus staring back with wide, innocent blue eyes, before he says: “That sounds about right.”

Allison starts up the car.

Klaus falls asleep within all of ten seconds of _roadtripping._ Good riddance. Allison immediately ejects Klaus’ weird, loud, shameful mixtape and puts in some of her own music collection, something Five can only thank her for.

They drive along the winding road that connects the mansion to the city, then they drive around some more. Five is almost certain none of them has any idea where they are going, and though he would be content to stay here and listen to the Talking Heads _(home,_ David Byrne wails, _home is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there)_ with none of their siblings bothering him with their yapping away, it is half past seven in the morning, and he needs about five cups of coffee to make up for the early rising.

“Are we there yet?”

Allison shakes her head. He waits for the entire song to go by before the cassette stops short, the whole album over already.

“Are we getting close now?”

She glares at him, mouthes the word _brat_ , which he is not proud to recognize because of how often it is directed at him. Five glowers as he changes the cassette - to the Bee Gees, because of course Allison would own a Bee Gees album - and skips every song until he gets to _Stayin’ Alive._ She smiles against her own will, takes a left turn a bit too sharp, and they’re in an outdoors parking lot.

“Hey, no need to try to kill us if you don’t like the tunes, it’s your music collection,” Five protests, and she continues her reckless driving by parking in a space that is objectively too small for her car, because apparently she isn’t that into stayin’ alive herself. He almost makes that pun, but wisely decides against it. Puns are for people with no dignity, like Klaus, who is stretching in the backseat, his crop top riding up to his navel. Sarcasm is the only form of humor Five entertains.

He can tell that Allison is glad to be parked and out of the car, her hands now freed from the wheel to clutch at her notebook and pen. He wonders how hard it must be, for someone who was so good at talking her way out of and into things, to be forced into silence like this. If it were him, he would never forgive Vanya as easily. Then again, if it were him who drove to that cabin in the woods, he isn’t sure things would have turned out the way they did.

It is sunny outside, and warm, one of the first real days of spring they have gotten so far - though he has only been there for two weeks, so what does he know about it - and sunlight bounces off the asphalt to shatter on Allison’s sunglasses. He can’t help but remember the funeral, the ice cream van debacle, and the President’s assassination or lack thereof, the last three times he has seen such a blue sky. His uniform is stuffy and too hot - he wishes he had put on the shorts instead of the pantsuit. Well, too late for that.

Usually, Delores is the one who points out these sorts of details to him, but he is not going to get all mopey about it. He is not. He is a rational man who knows it was all for the best and he is above mood swings like - _ugh._

Screw puberty.

He doesn’t pay attention to the doorbell ring when they get inside the shop, busy considering the possible exits, two of which are blocked by guys with man buns. The place is nice enough, an entire wall made out of a glass door and windows, little drawings of coffee made in chalk on the blackboard where the drinks were listed, but mostly Five didn’t understand why they went all the way to this mediocre coffee chain when they had semi-decent coffee back home, where they didn’t have to see anyone else. Especially not hungover college students and young mothers in flipflops.

Allison slides him a note that says: “1 - half-caf quad grande 1 pump white mocha 1 pump peppermint nonfat light water americano misto with curls 2 - whatever you want”. It takes him a few seconds to understand it is a coffee order.

“Do you _want_ them to hate you?” he asks. She takes off her sunglasses and raises her eyebrows. “Right. Movie star. You’re allowed to be obnoxious now.”

“Pretty much,” she mouthes, and this one he recognizes because he knows her.

Klaus picks something pretentious-sounding with vanilla in it, a cup of hot chocolate he is definitely not going to drink, and an entire box of donuts. Five ends up ordering the same obnoxious drink as Allison, partly because he trust her taste more than Klaus’, partly because he has no idea what an Americano or a Peach Green Tea Lemonade are supposed to be, or, well, most of the words written on the blackboard, really: his Latin resurfaces and why the hell are these people ordering _wind_ sized coffee?

Then it’s their turn, and Five recites all the seemingly random words Allison put on paper. When he is done, Klaus winks at the barista (gangly teen with bed hair and a black apron, no immediate threat). The guy looks distinctly like he is planning to kill them, then himself.

The girl who is serving them, on the other hand, gasps and calls out, reverently, “Allison?”. His sister smiles gently though more than a little bemusedly at her when she grabs her cup after they have waited for what felt like hours by the counter.

They sit down on tiny green pouches that are way more aesthetic than they are convenient by the glass wall, warmth pouring out onto the right side of Five’s face, Klaus putting on Allison’s sunglasses. Five is reluctant as he takes a sip of his drink.

Tasting Starbucks for the first time is a religious experience, but a very blasphemous one.

“What is _that,”_ he almost spits out.

“The nectar of the gods,” Klaus says, very seriously. Allison gasps and shows them her notebook, where she was writing down the exact same words. Klaus is delighted.

Five ignores their shenanigans. “Does it even have coffee in it? Because it doesn’t taste anything like coffee.”

As it turns out, as he realizes after he has had two refills and is buzzing with energy, it does have coffee in it. By that time, Allison has switched to decaf and is drawing tiny faces on her notebook while Klaus talks some more to the depressed barista and Five explains time travel theory to his sister with excited hand gestures. She is very politely but very clearly bored to tears, but still lets him speak anyway. It is not like she has a lot of other options.

Eventually, she pulls out a page that says, “I have a bit of clothes shopping to do, wanna join?” and Five, too busy enjoying the rush of too much caffeine flooding his bloodstream to realize the words were already written down and he is walking head first into a trap, says yes.

“A fool was I,” he finds himself muttering, blinking under blinding artificial lights three shops later, as Allison throws yet another blue T-shirt at him. She wrote down, quite aggressively if he might add, that it was his color, and he should shut up. This was back in the first store they went to, and Five had only been asking her if they could come home for ten minutes then. Klaus cackled in delight. “A _fool.”_

“Hey, where are you from again?” Klaus asks from across the men’s clothing aisle. He chooses to shout and be a general nuisance to all the other shoppers over walking up to them. “Because I found this delightful little kilt-”

“France,” Five cuts him before he can get any further.

“Aw, that’s too bad,” Klaus complains. “How comes none of us is Irish?”

“Since when has that ever stopped you from wearing kilts?”

Klaus pauses. Five hopes, against reason, that he choked on his own stupidity. But he speaks up again: “Nah, they don’t have my size.”

“Tragic,” Five comments drily. “Maybe you should try shopping out of the preteen section?”

Allison throws another pair of jeans at him and he struggles to catch it. She mouthes something about focus, or monkeys, whatever. Klaus walks back to them with his own selection, which she cards through with understandable skepticism - Allison’s fashion sense being much tamer than Klaus’. To be fair, most people’s were.

Five hates his life.

“I hate my life,” he says.

“Tough luck, cookie,” Klaus says, not even looking up from his intense and silent debate with Allison over shorts Five is certain he will hate.

When the ordeal is blissfully over with and Five has tried and failed to escape four times (after the first, they learned that latching onto Five with a hand gripping his arm tightly enough meant he could only space jump with them attached to his body, and they started keeping close contact with him at all times), they get food at the cheap pizza place in the mall, surrounded by families with noisy children. The pizza is subpar but greasy enough to make up for it, and Klaus tries to steal some from Five’s plate as Allison rolls her eyes at them. Five almost fights him there in the middle of the crowded restaurant.

On a more positive note, the waiters mistake Klaus and Allison for his parents’ _(do we look anything alike to you,_ Five says with horror) to everyone’s disgust. Five thinks about karma and smiles.

When they get back to the mansion with a trunkful of clothes (only two-thirds of them belonging to Five - they got tired of his wriggling and complaining after the fourth store), Diego and Luther cheer for Allison.

“How did you even get him to stick around?” Luther marvels.

 _“He_ is right there,” Five says, but Klaus says, louder: “Turns out the little prick can’t do shit if someone grabs him. Funny how no criminal ever thought of that.”

“Pretty sure he just stabbed whoever came close enough to grab him,” Diego says, something like pride in his voice.

“Yeah, that would help,” Klaus says.

“Still wondering why I didn’t stab you,” Five says.

“Boys, stop teasing your brother,” Grace chimes in, ever-so-smiling.

“But _Mom,”_ Diego whines before he catches himself.

They all mock him about it for a week after that. Then he shoots a knife in Klaus’ direction after an especially ingenious joke: it only grazes his ear and cuts through a stray curl, but Klaus kneels pretending to sob about his hair, his beautiful hair, which shouldn’t be nearly as funny as it is. They stop teasing Diego about being such a momma’s boy after that. Their survival instincts may be weak, but not that weak.

Five would never admit it to anyone but Delores, were she still with him, but watching his closet filled with clothes that aren’t Reginald Hargreeves’ old uniforms makes his chest fill up with something in return, that feels suspiciously like warmth. He isn’t used to the sensation. When he goes to the mall he left Delores at one day to have a chat, she tells him it might be hope.

 

Because Five does visit Delores, and often, with that. He knows this isn’t how normal people usually deal with their breakups, but then again, normal people don’t have relationships as strong as theirs was. So he asks Klaus to drop him off in exchange for his private lessons, a very dangerous choice since Klaus’ driving would put even Allison to shame, and Allison once left her car in the middle of the road without bothering with details like parking or not obstructing people’s ways because she saw Vanya’s scarf hanging from a sign.

Five guesses he might just enjoy living dangerously.

“Come on, I’m not an adrenaline junkie,” he protests when Delores glares at him reproachfully at the admission. His head is swimming and her reproachful silences are not helping in any way. “Try getting used to intertemporal assassinations and then getting back to a normal life, and you’ll see.”

She doesn’t even have to dignify this with an answer. Under the bright, artificial light of the clothing store, her skin looks unblemished and smooth, shinier than what he is used to. Maybe his head is hazy. Maybe the purple of her vest isn’t optimal at bringing out her eyes.

“You’re right, you’re right, I’m sorry. You and I, we’re on the same boat, uh?” he says. “How are you holding up these days, Delores? I see they gave you your old job back. I mean, sure, this pantsuit isn’t the most flattering they could have given you- alright, it’s insulting, but I did tell them to give you the sequin dress last week-”

“Sir, I have to ask you to please leave the shop,” the clerk says, wriggling her hands in a nervous way that reminds Five of Klaus. He makes her uncomfortable.

“Hey, give me five more minutes, alright? I’m almost done there.”

“I’m very sorry, but you need to leave,” she insists, a bit more assertive this time, but not much so.

“Come on, I’m not bothering anyone here, am I?” he says. “Am I, Delores?”

Her silence says more than words ever could.

The clerk opens her mouth again, and anger curls lazily around his drunken mind, but there is a hand on his shoulder, and a voice he knows resounding over his head. He looks up and there is Klaus, with his manic eyes surrounded by reddish shadows, trying to smooth down his high-pitched voice into something that sounds adult and responsible. Five has a hard time focusing - maybe Delores was right and he had one too many beers - but catches the gist, very sorry about my son, never been the same since his mother (tragic, well-timed sob) passed, et caetera, et caetera.

Klaus is already ushering him out the door (one last look at Delores, who sits still, expressionless, breaking his heart into oh-so-many pieces with her indifference) when Five slurs, “Maybe Allison isn’t the one who should have taken up acting,” and Klaus says, “shut up, she’s going to hear you, oh my _god.”_

Then they run to the car, and Klaus has to help him into the passenger seat and close his seatbelt for him, and Five curls up in the warm habitacle that smells like wet monkey hair (definitely Reginald’s) and listens to the radio, trying not to let every song remind him of Delores, as Klaus talks on and on in the background. It starts with something like: ““Aw, Five, you little weirdo, this is what you’re doing in your free time?” and keeps going on for minutes and minutes, drawn out.

He only focuses back on him when Klaus says Luther’s name.

“Don’t tell our brother,” he mutters.

“What?” Klaus asks as if he had forgotten Five was even there. “What do you mean-”

“Don’t tell Luther.”

“Oh.” Klaus pauses. “Well, I _should_ tell Luther.” Another beat. “Yes, young man, this is exactly what I am going to do- I’m going to tell Luther, and that will get your skinny little ass in trouble-”

“Don’t tell Luther or I’m not teaching you anything anymore,” Five says. He instantly feels bad, nauseous, stomach constricted as if he was about to throw up. Probably the beer.

Klaus stays silent for a while after that. It feels wrong. Then he turns at a red light to Five watching him and says: “Go to sleep, you backstabbing, selfish, self-destructive prick,” so that’s what Five does.

 

He wakes up to the sight of Luther filling up all the space in his room, the curved line of his hunched shoulders, his arms resting on his knees, his legs bent awkwardly to fit the chair he is sitting on, entirely too small for him. Five thinks distantly that there is no way Klaus carried him all the way up to his bed, and he thinks of what he must smell like to Luther, booze sweat seeping off his skin, tiny in his arms.

“The little asshole,” are his first words waking up. “Since when has Klaus developed a conscience?”

Luther sits up straighter. Five notes distantly that his turtleneck is quite a few shades darker than the baby blue walls of Five’s childhood bedroom, but still more colorful than anything Luther would usually wear. “He was right to bring you back here when he did,” Luther says, voice rough. “You could have been very sick. I know you don’t like to hear it, but you’re only thirteen, Five, and the alcohol poisoning-”

“Yes, alcohol is bad, caffeine is bad, et caetera,” Five says, trying to sit up and - oh no, head swimming, not a good idea, no no no, back down it is. "Anything worth living for is worth dying for.”

“This isn’t a situation where using some old dead guy’s pseudo-philosophical bullshit will help you,” Diego says, from where he is standing in the doorway. “There’s a reason that old dead guy is dead.”

“Well said,” Five deadpans. “I’ll be sure to tell Joseph Heller all about it when we meet up for our weekly squash games in heaven.”

“You know, you’re not as funny as you think-” Diego starts, but Luther interrupts him.

“Five, I think you’re deflecting with sarcasm because you are uncomfortable with the current situation,” he says.

“Gosh, and which self-help book did you swallow?” Five asks. Luther’s sheepish air gives him all the answers he needs.

“Look,” Luther says. “It’s hard. I get it.”

“No you don’t,” Five bites.

Luther shoots him a pointed look. “Yeah, sure. The mission that gave your existence meaning and that you spent your entire life looking forward to is not a thing anymore and you’re lost without it, so you start acting irrationally and being, in general, a moron. I wonder how that feels.”

Five is shocked silent, which surprises even him. Diego isn’t, though, turning towards Luther, telling him, only half mocking: “Is that self reflection I am hearing? From you?”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” Luther mumbles.

“Uh, I think I do, yeah.”

They start bickering, and it’s just like the usual, Number One and Number Two sniping at each other, and his old room with the red toy truck on the desk and the robots fighting on a bright yellow poster and the collection of books and the Legos and the fresque of children chasing each other along the walls and he says, more subdued than he is used to: “I think I want to switch rooms.”

Luther and Diego shut up and Five can see Luther visibly deflate with the relief to have a request he can actually answer to. “Of course, yes, we’ll set you up in D- in one of the unused rooms, we’ll move around some furniture.”

“Mom can take Five’s old room,” Diego contributes. “If we throw out some of the t-toys…”

“No,” Luther says, and for a second Five thinks Diego is going to beat him right here and there, but he continues: “All of these toys are perfectly functional, Diego, there’s no way we’re throwing them away. There’s this place where we can donate old stuff downtown, we should go by this week.”

For a second, Diego just looks at Luther, a weird expression on his face, before he almost smiles and says, “Yeah, sure, why not?”

Five, who is after all a trained intertemporal assassin, uses their distraction to create a tiny wormhole under his body and space jump to the bathroom, where he proceeds to throw up everything he has ingested in the past twelve hours - mostly liquid, though. When he gets out, Luther is standing by the door he has been threatening to tear out of the wall a few seconds ago, and makes him understand in no uncertain words that he is in no way off the hook, that they are to have this entire intervention when his hangover is over and that it will involve the whole family.

Gee, thanks. He cannot wait.

Five turns away from him to go and throw up some more. He ends up sleeping the day away, half-watching the TV with lidded eyes, a stupid cooking program he doesn’t have the strength to get up to change and that Mom watches raptly. It’s as good a way to spend a Monday as any.

 

Eventually, after twenty four hours, the hangover passes. There is still a throbbing pain behind his right eye socket, an ache in his chest whenever he thinks about Delores’ last words, her last emotionless look at him, and a nauseous feeling in his stomach when he catches sight of Klaus that he is beginning to understand is guilt. Five isn’t familiar with the concept - unless one was talking about survivor’s guilt, of course, which he is used to and has read all about in his leisure time - and frankly, he doesn’t care much for it. Apparently killing countless people is nothing compared to being slightly rude to your brother for a very understandable reason - go figure. Five blames Reginald’s British parenting. He also decides it will go away on its own since he doesn’t plan on apologizing to anyone about anything anytime soon.

Instead, he plops down on Klaus’ bed, dumps a glass of water on his head, and says: “Wake up, asshole, we have a lesson.”

“Noooo,” Klaus whines. “No waking up. Sleep.”

“How long have you been sleeping already? It’s all everybody does in this house,” Five says. “I’m the one whose body is still growing, not you.”

“Sleep good,” Klaus mumbles into his pillow. “Gonna sleep for the rest of my life.”

“I think it’s called a coma.”

“Seems festive.”

Klaus does get up though, after a few more complaints and tearful goodbyes. Five would almost feel sorry for the guy if he wasn’t still a bit mad about the Luther thing and if he felt sorry for people in general.

Of course, that changes as soon as they walk into the living room.

First, there is Diego standing up, arms crossed, looking pissed but not much more so than usual. The frown isn’t what tips Five off. The fact that he is choosing to stay in the same room as Luther, Vanya and Allison without being under duress is. Second, Vanya, sitting with a leg pulled up to her chest on the couch next to Allison - an arm draped over the back of the couch, always regal even in her nightwear - is pouring coffee into a blue porcelain cup that has the number 5 on it, courtesy of Mom, who wanted to buy these old school porcelain bowls with their names on it, resigned herself to the fact that none of their names were ever on one of those and made them herself. This is a honeytrap if Five has ever seen one.

And then, well, there is the fact that Klaus goes to lay down on the carpet with a vindicated expression and says, “Let the family discussion begin! Should Five have a stricter curfew? Does he deserve the same rights as us? Can he be banned from knives? I think we should vote on this.”

“Next on the program: Should Klaus be banned from votes?” Allison painstakingly writes on a piece of paper that she shows Vanya, who laughs. “The debate is open.”

Five can only appreciate her dedication to mocking Klaus.

The prospect of the whole ordeal alone is enough to make him feel incredibly tired all of a sudden. “You know you’re going to tell me to do things,” he points out, “and I’m going to say, yes, why not, dear brothers and sisters, I would love to, and then I am just going to keep doing what I want anyway?”

“He has a point,” Diego says.

“Whose side are you on?” Luther asks.

“Not yours, that’s for sure,” Diego shoots back, but there is something different in his voice, or his face maybe, a corner of his lip tugged upward just a little, and it doesn’t feel as mean-spirited as usual.

“Come on. We need to set boundaries. He might be fifty-eight, but he’s still a kid.”

“Surprisingly, not the weirdest thing I’ve heard today,” Klaus mutters, reaching for a can of Diet Coke dripping with condensation.

“Maybe we should start by asking him what he wants,” Diego says, and Five knows he is only doing this to be contradictory, but still, he appreciates it. “What do you want, Five?”

“I want to not be having this conversation.”

“Does any of us?” Klaus asks.

Diego raises his eyebrows, unimpressed. “You gotta help me out a little here.”

“Why would I? It’s so much more fun this way,” Five deadpans, fake sweet smile in place. Diego takes an angry step forward and Luther shoots him a warning look. Vanya leans close to Allison and asks if they have popcorn, and their sister laughs in that strange, silent way of hers now, nose crinkled, smiling mouth and gasps of air.

“Listen, Five,” Luther starts awkwardly, “you know I’m grateful that you have helped me with the, uh, family business we had to handle, but I’m worried about you now. What do you do all day?”

“I read,” Five says. “I exercise. I keep busy.” He doesn’t mention investigating his siblings. “I am a productive member of this family. Just ask Vanya, who, by the way, is also stuck here with me all the time, and I don’t see you doing an intervention for her. Why, I wonder?”

Allison sighs, _here we go again,_ lays down against the back of the couch and reaches for blue nail polish. Klaus tracks her every move with interested eyes. He is definitely going to ask her to help him out as soon as this is finally over.

To everyone’s surprise, Vanya speaks up. “I think… I think maybe you could go back to school?”

Five shoots her his most unimpressed look. “And spend my day with thirteen-year-olds? When was the last time you spent time with a thirteen-year-old? They are the worst people you will ever meet.” (He pointedly ignores all of his siblings’ snorts at that and Diego’s “Yeah, we _noticed_.”) “I would sooner chop off my arm, then let Mom use it as a whisk-”

“Enough,” Luther says.

“Morbid. You’re getting more and more imaginative with these,” Klaus whistles.

“Thank you, I try.”

“Does anyone want biscuits?” Mom tries, peeking into the room.

Vanya pauses to take a cookie and smile at Mom in thanks before she starts talking again, voice still a bit hesitant but going stronger. “Not middle school. I was thinking, maybe you could pass your SATs and then start an online degree next fall? I know it doesn’t sound good, but you really will need it when you’re in the real world-”

“What ‘real world’?” Five asks with air quotes. Allison starts flipping through her notebook. “Is this not real enough for you, Vanya?”

“Come on. You know what I mean,” Vanya says.

Allison puts up one of her prewritten pages, saying: “She’s right.” Vanya looks a little encouraged at that.

“I mean,” Luther picks up. “Vanya has a point. I have work to do with Pogo, and Allison has her daughter and, uh, medical stuff,” he says delicately, though she still winces, “and acting, and Diego has this whole weird beating up criminals in spandex thing-”

“Sorry, what?” Diego says.

“-and even Vanya has her violin practice and therapy and, uh, I guess sports now, but you and Klaus don’t really… Have things to do.”

“Sorry, what?” Klaus and Five say this time.

“You know I didn’t mean it like that, I meant-”

As if a bomb’s timer had gone off, a chaos of interloping voices starts.  “What, the drug addict and the kid are too much for you, you don’t want to leave them at home unsupervised-”

“You stay home all day, this can’t be healthy-”

“What would _you_ even know about healthy-”

“Anyone else wants biscuits?”

“You want everything to go your way, all the time, have been since we were kids-”

“Oh, come on, not the old Eiffel Tower story again-”

“Just because you’re yelling something doesn’t make it intelligent-”

The room explodes with noise, everyone arguing with some other person about something, then turning around to tell another sibling how wrong they are, and Five argues with them, and it’s just - so much. Voices boom across the room, barrel over the walls, cut across each other. Suddenly Five is crouching on the back of their father’s old armchair, finally on eye level with a very unimpressed Diego, and Allison’s mouth shapes sentences they cannot read at the speed her words flow. Vanya has her head in her hands and Mom, still standing with her plate, is small and lost. Luther waves his arms around until a lamp is accidentally thrown across the room, shattering on impact.

It shouldn’t be that surprising when Vanya is the one who yells: _“Enough!”_

All of the doors slam. They all fall silent.

The room doesn’t, though, rushes of wind deafening around them, muffled thumps of books falling off the shelves onto the carpet. The entire house is creaking, whining, crying out in pain and confusion at the treatment it receives. For one weird, surreal moment, Five doesn’t even think Vanya is doing anything - in between the echoes of past arguments and childish wails, he looks around him and it’s a haunted house.

Allison is the first to move, rushing by Vanya’s side from where she was arguing silently with Klaus across the room, rubbing her back, soothing. There is a spilled bottle of nail polish on the room, and it is most definitely going to stain their century-old classic floorboards with blue, but nobody seems to care much about it. For a few seconds, it’s only the sound of her soft hum and the ominous wind picking up and winding down around them. Five can do nothing but stare, throat impossibly tight, at the plate of cookies laying face down at his feet, its contents spread all over the carpet. Distantly, he thinks about how long it is going to take to sweep it all off.

After a few seconds, Diego bends down and starts picking up the bits and Mom, moving more like an automaton than ever, joins him, whispering her thanks. Her programming probably isn’t even letting her near Vanya until the chore is over. It hits Five how selfish and small he feels, still perched on the chair where he appeared as he was arguing with Klaus or Diego or anyone, really - he doesn’t even remember.

When Diego and Mom finish sweeping and Luther sits down on the couch with a sigh heavier than Five’s body and Vanya is ushered into her room, shaking with nerves, there are only three of them left. Klaus goes to the window and lights a cigarette, not even bothering, for once, to hide the tremor in his hands. Without any makeup, in the bleak morning light, the shadows under his eyes are purplish like bruises.

It takes a while for Diego to walk back into the room with his arms crossed and a pissed off expression, but even then he says nothing.

It is so deadly quiet (there is another moment of perfect silence he pushes at the back of his mind, now is not the time, not that there would ever be a time) that Five ends up saying: “I’m too busy for college anyway.” He sounds petulant even to his own ears.

“What, what have _you_ got to do all day?” Klaus asks, mocking. “Flirting with mannequins? No, wait, is it getting wasted on lemonade? Or-”

“Enough, Klaus,” Luther mutters. Still, he looks up at Five, expecting an answer, fingers picking a stray thread of wool from the scraped forearm of his sweater.

Making sure they really are in the safest timeline. Talking to Delores in his head. Rereading Vanya’s book like he is missing some vital, secret detail hidden in here somewhere. Pushing back the Apocalypse for a few more years. Again and again and again - it’s all he knows how to do anyway.

“Things.”

“See, that’s not gonna cut it,” Diego says.

“Maybe I don’t care about what cuts it for you, Diego,” Five says, hearing his voice rise with his annoyance more than he feels it.

“Or maybe you know he’s going to disapprove, so you’re not even trying,” Klaus suggests. They all look at him. “What? I’m full of insights on human nature, too. I’m wise beyond my years.”

“I don’t care what you think of it or not,” Five says. “Your approval means nothing to me. I just don’t want you getting in the way.”

“Why?” Diego asks, louder. “What’s so fucking important that you spent all day thinking about it and taking notes - oh, come on, don’t think we don’t see you, with your stupid notebook - but you don’t tell us about it? Please, enlighten us.”

“Since when is this an _us_ situation?” Five says.

“Since we’re concerned about you, Five,” Luther says, more smoothly, but doesn’t quite manage to calm the situation.

“You think none of us read your stupid notebooks-”

“You read my research?” Five cuts Diego off.

“We were trying to understand what was wrong,” Luther says, and he is pleading now - that’s new. Maybe he got it from the self-help book - oh wait - maybe he got it from Allison with her slashed out throat.

“Turns out I’m not the only one whose head is messed up,” Klaus says. “No offense.”

“What?”

Five doesn’t understand.

“Mister Hargreeves. Your notes made no sense,” Pogo says. Five whips around and sure enough, there he is standing, cane and struggling simian feet. “Don’t be mad - your mother only brought them to me so I could peer over them when she could not understand it. She was worried about you, sneaking out of your room, sneaking into our rooms. Understandably so, if I might add.”

Five is shocked silent. All of their eyes are on him now, full of something that is not fear, something that looks disturbingly like pity, and Five _doesn’t understand_ \- he can’t even begin to comprehend what they are saying.

“Look,” Luther says. “You lost your purpose. You don’t know what to do when there is nothing left but real life. Outside life. I get it-”  

This is when it clicks inside Five’s head.

“No, you don’t!” he blows up. All of a sudden, all the words kept hidden from them the past three weeks, the past forty-five years, all the secrets and the notebooks filled with questions and equations, all bubble up in his throat, and it hurts to talk but he cannot stop himself. “Something weird is going on, and I'm the only one who knows it. I'm the only one to know anything in this house. I’m the one who knew about the apocalypse. I’m the one who had to save you. I’m the one who had to live for forty-five years and know I’d outlived every single one of you. And there is something weird going on, and so what if I don’t talk about it - who would I talk to anyway? It’s not like there is anyone who can help.”

There is a pause, awkward and marked where the only sound is Five’s desperate inhales trying to catch his breath again. His throat is weird, gripped, and he would be worried somebody was choking him, but he knows that feeling all too well by now and that’s not it, and he doesn’t understand why his body feels so far away.

“Five,” someone calls out behind him, and he doesn’t know why he is so surprised, when he turns around, to see Vanya and Allison, the later tugging at her sister’s sleeve with worry. Vanya talks again, and her voice is impossibly soft. Her words resonate in the morning air. “Five, it’s over. The apocalypse didn’t happen. You did it already. There is nothing more left for you to fight.”

“There is always something to fight,” Five says.

“No, you don’t understand,” Vanya insists. “There is nothing more left for you to fight. This right here?” She waves at the room around them, the furniture that feels foreign and familiar, the old bar with all the hard liquors thrown out for Klaus, Mom, Dad’s old chair, the windows where the clouds cover up the sky like a milky television screen, the sun that peeks through them through the tiniest of cracks, that falls into the room in shards of light, makes the specks of dust glint golden, the wooden floor bronze, Vanya’s eyes amber. “This is all there is. There’s nothing _more,_ Five.”

“I don’t-” Five starts and stops himself. He isn’t sure what to say.

“No more destiny or Umbrella Academy bullshit,” Diego adds. “You’re free. That’s why it’s so fucking hard.”

“But you’re home now,” Luther ends with. “You don’t have to try to come back anywhere.”

They all fall silent for the longest time until Vanya makes the first move, smiles at him, a bittersweet, fragile smile, and leaves the room. She has always known him better than anyone.

They all leave one after another after that, Pogo quietly with a last forlorn look, Allison putting her hand on his shoulder and kissing his forehead, Diego with his arm around Mom, whose battery is running low, Luther bending down in something that could be an attempt at a hug and losing his courage halfway through, until there is nobody left but Klaus and Five. Klaus lit another cigarette at one point in the discussions, and he is careful not to blow smoke in Five’s direction when he leans against the column next to him, drops down a little until he is barely taller that Five.

“It’s weird when it’s just you and the rest of your life, isn’t it?” Klaus says.

Five looks up at him distantly. It all feels unreal. Like his brain cannot process what happened and needs some time alone, away from his own body.

“In your notebooks,” Klaus continues. “Pogo said you kept wondering who I talked to.”

He waits for a confirmation from Five, one that never comes. After a few seconds, he must give up on that hope and makes a move to leave, except right then Vanya is back in the room, coffee pot steaming in her right hand, the fingers of her left one hooked around the rings of a few mugs. Klaus instinctively helps her carry it all in the room. She hands a mug to Five wordlessly before she goes to lean against the wall beside them. He tries to show gratefulness in his face, but he isn’t sure he quite manages. He gulps down coffee and it smoothes down his throat, travels all the way to his stomach where it lays, a comforting, grounding warmth in Five’s body that is not quite his.

She hesitates a bit before she says: “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but… It’s him, isn’t it? That’s why you want to learn how to make ghosts real. Not real, I mean- real for us. Corporeal.”

Klaus smiles. It’s humorless. “Yeah. It’s him.” He sips at his mug. “It’s Ben.”

They drink in silence after that.

 

* * *

 

_“But it was then that I realized (...) there was nothing for me to aspire to be anymore. It was like the life that I had wanted for as long as I could remember (...) had finally fallen apart: without The Umbrella Academy, I had (...) the freedom to be whomever I chose.”_

 - Excerpt from _Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven,_ by Vanya Hargreeves

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> louise: oh Klaus would be right up Leo da Vinci's alley .... twink with a vague beard and long-ish hair.... that's how we got Jesus  
> me: also consider: he died and god told him "you're a whiny lil bitch go back there" so like. the similarities are endless
> 
> louise: swearing on a ouija board is probably the gayest thing you can do  
> louise, again: is your brother seeing dead people or is it just the gay? more on that after the break
> 
> the quote from vanya's book is thanks to @littlehobbit13 (http://littlehobbit13.tumblr.com/post/183042834234/meals-became-the-one-time-of-day-to-be)'s work who made a post decrypting screenshots from the show. an Icon 
> 
> as usual my tumblr is @vanya-hargreeves-apologist where i shitpost about TUA and i always like talking to you guys!!!! 
> 
> and if you want to tell me LITERALLY anything, discovering your comments makes me happier than discovering starbucks coffee made number five


	5. five ii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hi, sweetheart,” Grace says the next day, her smile somewhat dimmer than usual. (Or maybe it is the opposite, shining as if in an old school ad, unnaturally white.) “Is it alright with you if I sit down?”
> 
> Five guesses he is not doing much apart from gazing at the steam fade away and wondering if the caffeine is going to kick in and give him answers about life, death, the universe and everything in between anytime soon.
> 
> “I am pretty sure we already established that I don’t have anything to do with my life, so, be free,” he says. His chuckle is mirthless and the bitterness on his tongue has nothing to do with coffee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> having chapter five be for Five is… weirdly satisfying ngl
> 
> currently posting this at like 1am when louise reread it like one hour ago and because i was so so so excited to post this and hear what you guys think!!!! 
> 
> BIG thank you to louise as usual bc she’s the best butch (what’s new) and also my gal audrey for kicking my ass into writing via 11 messages in a row and threatening to make me do pushups
> 
> not a lot of beginning notes this time because the end notes are long and i don’t want to bother you guys so have fun

They say tomorrow is another day. Needless to say, that day still brings no new idea of what to do with the rest of Five’s life now. 

One day Vanya told him it was all about taking that one step at a time, sounding like she was just parroting what her therapist had told her, and Five had laughed at her face. But he guesses maybe some clichés end up becoming true after a while.

He begins by changing his morning routine from staring at his bedroom ceiling to staring at a new closet filled with clothes he didn’t pick and, for once, not choosing his old uniform again. All of his options are terrible, of course, but he somewhat tolerates a dark shirt he buttons all the way up to his neckline and black jeans that don’t have any holes in them, thank God. (Or, in that case, thank Allison.) He decides it is a pretty solid start, as far as one can have a solid start when they are thrown into the unknown of life with no preparation whatsoever, a vague sense of self and years worth of trauma.

He exits the room he stays in now, the one Luther crammed a double bed into with great pain and the stubborn refusal of Diego’s help, still bare of anything apart from clothes that are not quite his and slightly musty bed covers. The big empty white walls should be depressing: instead, they stare back at Five like a blank page. There are wooden planks laying on the floor next to the east wall where Diego said he would install bookshelves. They make Five think about his old notebooks, hidden away in boxes, and the new ones, spines uncreased, sitting neatly next to the planks, and wonder what he will write in these.

When he gets down, Klaus tells him that just because he is a sixty-year-old man doesn’t mean he has to dress like it and Diego tells Klaus to  _ shut up, he looks fine  _ and Five doesn’t know which of the two insults him the most. He sits next to Vanya, pours his one cup of non-decaf coffee a day (that Luther knows of) into the biggest bowl he can find and decides he is too old to deal with their nonsense. 

Nobody asks him what he is going to do with his day, even though they all seem more aware of his presence than usual and Allison’s fingers tap on her notebook unnervingly. He would let them wallow in their emotional constipation, but a voice in the back of his head that sounds a lot like Delores’ chides him reproachfully. She is always getting him to do the right thing even from a distance, and he tries not to feel too much about this.

“Is there anyone who can drop me off at Ikea today?” he asks while he spreads peanut butter on his toast, taking pity on them as Vanya hands him the bag of marshmallows wordlessly. “I need to get a few things for my room.”

Of course, he doesn’t actually need anyone to drive him, because he can drive better than half the people in this room (including Klaus who is a human disaster and insists on pretending he doesn’t need glasses, Vanya who never got her license and Grace who is a robot, sure, but still), but he guesses maybe if he pretends to they will stop bothering him about his life and plans and future and top five colleges or whatever it is kids care about these days. It was much easier when his future was just the hope he wouldn’t die before he could legally drink, daydreams about escaping Reginald Hargreeves, and, possibly, robots. 

“Oh, of course!” Grace says excitedly. “Diego and I meant to go to the store pick up another lamp today- no, darling, don’t worry about it, please, one of your dad’s friends gave it to him and Pogo never liked that lamp all that much,” she adds when Vanya looks up from her bowl of cereals with wide eyes and a conspicuously guilty expression. “We can all go together! It sounds fun.”

Luther’s unsubtle grimace tells Five everything he needs to know about how much fun it would be. “You know what, Grace, I don’t want to impose-”

“You’re right, Mom,” Diego talks all over him. “It does sound like fun.”

She beams at them both. Vanya hides her smile around a mouthful of cereals, but Allison isn’t so merciful. Five feels like he is the only one he can blame for setting this trap on himself, but that would involve recognizing he made a mistake, which he firmly refuses to do. 

So instead he fakes his best grin and says: “I got to give Klaus his daily lesson, but we can meet up around four, provided that is alright with you, of course,” hoping Grace will fret over how late that would make her for dinner or Diego will be hindered in his evening activities. The later does seem likely as his jaw starts locking even more tightly than usual, but of course, nothing in Five’s life happens as planned.

“Sure thing!” Grace singsongs instead.

Five cannot quite hide his discomfiture from showing and Allison still doesn’t bother hiding her laughter. He kicks at her shins under the table, and her shoulders only start shaking harder. Luther, on the other hand, yelps in indignation. 

“Sorry,” he grumbles to his bowl. “Bad aim.”

He doesn’t say out loud that this house is a fucking nightmare because he has some shreds of dignity left, thank you very much, but he thinks about it very loudly and resolves to tell Delores all about it if she ever lets him visit again. 

 

One could think that, now that Five knows why Klaus wants to use his powers and how motivated he really is, their lessons would get better or more peaceful. Though they have in fact resolved to increase their pace significantly, it becomes obvious from the get-go that the additional pressure did not, in fact, make for a better work environment, a fact Five thinks he could sell for good money to bestselling “Improve your workplace productivity” books and other works of Steve Jobs’ ghostwriters. (Does Steve Jobs exist in this timeline? Five is almost certain he doesn’t. Not that he is complaining in any way, but it raises questions: was Five in charge of this? There were so many missions one could barely blame him for forgetting some of them.)

Anyway: Klaus is still the worst student possible, and Five is starting to think teaching might not be his calling after all.

“Klaus,” he says, very calm, “do you remember when we were twelve, and I woke up because I smelt smoke, and I came to your room, and your bed was on fire, and I asked you why you had done it, and you said you wondered what would happen if you set fire to your bedsheets?”

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Klaus opens one cranky eye. Grimaces. “Well, I mean, it does sound like something I would do. I did always have a scientific curiosity and, dare I say, yes, an almost childlike sense of wonder.”

Five closes his eyes, massages his temples, takes a deep breath. He tries to remember everything he likes about his brother. It is no mere task. “Do you know why I remember this moment and not you?”

“I mean, man, I was pretty high that year,” Klaus says, then pauses, considering. “Actually, the year after that too. Can we just assume I don’t remember anything about my teenage years, in general?”

Deep breath. 

Five opens his eyes again, stares at Klaus’ slack, open face, his slow and lazy smirk. He feels his lips turn up into a snarl as he says: “This is when I understood that you were a complete moron.”

Klaus is shocked silent for all of two seconds before he guffaws and breaks position, falling down on his elbows, outside of the pentacle Five painstakingly spent one hour drawing earlier today. He smears the chalk all over the floor and all over his black clothes (ruining leather pants and a remarkably tacky fake fur coat - probably for the best). Five wants to strangle him.

It is not that Five doesn’t like his brother. It’s just that he would probably like him a lot more if he wasn’t trying to get him focused for an entire afternoon every few days. 

He tries not to be bitter about how difficult it all is, which is very hard, for him, as a person. And really. It’s raising their dead brother from the grave. How hard could it be?

“I’m done,” Five says for the seventh time since he has been back. “I am not wasting a single more minute of my time on you. You’re obviously not even trying.”

“Aw, come on,” Klaus says in between laughs. “You wouldn’t do that. I’m your favorite student!”

“You’re my only student and you’re not even my favorite student.”

“Aoutch. Your words, they hurt, you know,” Klaus says, face entirely too earnest to be honest.

“Well, you know what they say about sticks and stones.”

“They make break my bones, but chains and whips-”

_ “I’m done,”  _ Five repeats, louder.

He turns away to leave, and Klaus’ hysterical laugh follows him to the door until they turn into sobs. 

For a minute, Five doesn’t know what to do. He has never had to deal with these situations before - usually, when one of them broke down, it was Vanya, and someone else was nearby, ready to swoop in, Allison or Grace or Luther or even Diego, more and more. This on the other end - this is new.

He doesn’t want to go back in. He doesn’t  _ want  _ to. His brother is an adult and he doesn’t need anyone to hold his hand or pet his hair. Sure, he is an adult who has been suffering from withdrawal for just a little shy of one month though he has been on drugs for more than half of his lifespan, and he is struggling under the weight of being haunted by their brother - his best friend, really - that they all let down in his final months and not being able to do anything about it ever since they were teenagers, and he does try to help Five through his own issues and drove him to the mall for two weeks to see Delores and paid for the popcorn that one time they went to a movie together with money Five isn’t sure he wants to know the source of-

Five curses his compassion’s sudden and unexpected return to life, and he goes back inside.

More accurately, he pivots slowly, his body surer of what to do than his mind itself, and lingers awkwardly at the door. Klaus is still right there, on the ground in the middle of the dining room where Five had set camp, next to the empty freezer and the cold tiles and the backdoor they would rather come in from than the big, cold entrance. If Five didn’t know him better, he wouldn’t even recognize the shaking of his shoulders, the glistening around his eyelids. In some ways he doesn’t recognize it, not really, but an old part of him, an instinct he didn’t know he even had, wakes up, and this is when he knows this isn’t the first time he has seen Klaus like this, though he would hardly remember when if asked about it. They cried a lot when they were little.

Absently, looking at the shape of his brother under him, he remembers skeletons prostrated at the museum, animals who curled up on themselves when the meteors came. There is something feral about someone crying, and just as out of place. 

He crouches down next to Klaus, tilts his head to the side, and, hesitant, puts a hand on his shoulder, wonders if he should be feeling more than he is right now - aren’t people usually sad in these situations?

“There, there,” he tries. He knows, in a theoretical way, that he should pat the other person on the shoulder as he speaks, so he does.

In some ways, it works. After a few seconds of stunned silence, Klaus chuckles through his labored breathing. “Oh, wow. Man, you really are shit at this.”

“That is completely uncalled for,” he tells him. He is only half paying attention, busy racking his brain for how his siblings react when one of them has a panic attack - should he go look for someone else? Mom, maybe? He remembers somewhat Allison and Klaus hugging each other back when they got their tattoos (their  _ brands),  _ the way Allison would tell people to breathe. “You’re having a fit. You need to focus on your breathing.”

“Oh, that’s just brilliant. Are you going to ask me to do yoga too? Maybe put on some nice ambiance music? Because I must tell you, my downward dog position-”

“How are you still nasty even like this,” Five cuts him.

“Hey, it’s a real thing. It exists. I swear, why does no one,” Klaus asks, trying to smile and failing before his voice breaks: “ever believe me?” 

Five wants to say that they do, but it would be a lie, and he is proficient at lying, trained to be, but somehow it would feel wrong to do it now. So instead he stays silent, rubs Klaus’ back inadequately, counts the seconds in his head. He guesses at least he is there. That’s something.

Then Klaus starts talking again, and Five is ready to go get someone else for this, except he is not talking to him, but to  _ him  _ \- Ben.

“Of course I have,” gasp, “to do this,” he snaps. His halted breath makes his words flow uneasily, stopping at weird places then picking up again. “Don’t be a moron.”  A beat. Then: “Oh my god, if you get any more self-sacrificing,” beat, “I will find a way- I’ll find a way to bring you back and then I’ll kill you myself.” He pauses. “What? Of course I know it makes no sense. Don’t try to logic me. I’m having a panic attack. You prick.”

“What is he saying?” Five asks, halfway out of burning curiosity, halfway out of concern.

“Something something, you don’t have to do this, maybe I don’t mind so much being stuck in limbo for eternity after all, whatever,” Klaus groans. “And then he complained what  _ I _ said didn’t make sense.”

“Oh, the usual Ben, then.”

“Pretty much, yeah.” Klaus pauses, struggling for breath, but less so than a few minutes ago. He shuts both his eyes, crinkling his nose. 

Five still has his hand on his shoulder, simply staying there, unmoving. Klaus’ heartbeat, fast and panicked like a hummingbird, thrums under it slower and slower. Five barely notices: there is something he wonders about and would probably be told off by Vanya for asking, but… Satisfaction brought back the cat, after all.

“Are there a lot of dead people here? Apart from Ben, of course.”

“Well, it is an old house,” Klaus says. “There is always the odd Victorian handmaiden out. But mostly, no, they all passed on a while ago, I think - I don’t really get how any of this works. I met God once and she told me she didn’t like me, so my guess is there may or may not be a heaven and God may or may not be a jerk.”

Five squints. “How Jewish of you.” Then: “Wait, how drunk were you when you saw God?”

“You know what, Five, I didn’t come here to be judged- oh,” Klaus pauses, before telling someone slightly above Five’s right shoulder: “You’re right. It has gone away. That’s nice.”

“I guess having the attention span of a toddler finally paid off,” Five says. 

“Fuck you,” Klaus groans, but he sits up a little. He might not look comforted, with his sunken eyes and his cheeks still tear-stained, still rubbing his nose on his sleeve, but at least he is not hyperventilating anymore, so maybe Five isn’t all that bad at this after all. (When he mentions it again to Klaus, he tells him: “Oh no, you were bad. But your lingering awkwardness did distract me from my existential  _ Angst _ , so, kudos to you.” Then again Klaus uses an unnecessary German accent to say angst, so what does he know about anything.)

Five ends up making peanut butter sandwiches for Klaus, who insists he doesn’t need marshmallows on his because he is trying to get _ beach body ready _ \- something both their sisters would have smacked him for - before grabbing the jar of peanut butter and eating it by the spoonful. Five guesses it is sort of better than chainsmoking for comfort. He doesn’t want to be there for the sickness that is sure to follow, though. 

This time, he notices the way Klaus gets an extra spoon that stays unused, laying face up by Ben’s usual seat at the table, and it makes him sort of happy and it makes him sort of sad.

 

Diego and Five spend what feels like an hour arguing over a bedside table while Grace hums and picks a tasteful, modern lamp that fits absolutely no part of the manor’s current furniture. Nonetheless, they get through it mostly unscarred, despite getting lost for all of three hours in between aisles, which Five insists is Diego’s fault, because he can jump through the time-space continuum and as such has perfect situational awareness and map-reading skills, thank you very much. 

Grace stays unnervingly smiling and preppy the entire time, which Five knows she is programmed to be, but still irks him in some secret, irritating way. When they get back, it is late and they decide to pick up MacDonald’s on the way, the smell of which is suspicious to Five, but apparently quite popular in this decade. 

The fast food place is in the same mall Five used to visit to see Delores, the one facing the animal shelter and the old, struggling bakery, so he tries to ignore this and her. 

Grace is tasked with calling the manor to ask for everyone’s orders and Five figures this is it. 

“Alright, so,” Diego hesitates at the drive-through, voice even huskier than usual. “We got, uh, a maxi menu with a double quarter pounder with cheese, sweet tea and cheesy bacon fries, two Big Macs, one maxi menu with a Big Mac bacon, fries and Dr Pepper, a McChicken menu with diet coke and fries, a vanilla shake, one,” Diego looks at the notepad with a disgusted expression, “best of mushroom and swiss buttermilk crispy chicken with fries and a diet coke, a hot caramel sundae, hotcakes, a McFlurry with Oreo cookies, a crispy chicken salad, and...,” Diego turns around to ask Five, “what did you say wanted?”

Five looks at him blankly. “A burger with fries.”

Diego closes his eyes and inhales visibly before he turns back to the poor McDonald’s employee who doesn’t even seem surprised that this is his life. “A Happy Meal. With a burger, fries, and one of these tiny apple juice thingies.”

“The police will never find your body,” Five announces.

“Actually, can you please add an extra toy to the Happy Meal?” Diego asks. 

“Boys,” Grace says, not quite managing to sound displeased through her amusement. 

Five kicks the front seat until Diego turns around to yell at him and they almost crash into another car and they are shocked silent. They are polite to each other for the rest of the trip, bickering in more hushed tones than usual, which might be because sharing a near-death experience brings people closer or because dying in a car accident with five bags of junk food in the backseat would just be undignified at that point in their lives. Grace is satisfied either way.

 

Five figures this is it for his interactions with her. After all, he doesn’t really see what he has to say to her, or her to him: she is the caretaker their father designed, and since he doesn’t care much for being taken care of or Reginald Hargreeves, he doesn’t have much interest in pursuing her approval the way Diego does. He doesn’t understand Diego, really: he is possibly the one among them who hates their father the most or at least the most openly, and still, he worships the ground his machine walks on. 

That doesn’t mean Five is about to be rude to her. He respects women. He also respects that, though he would never admit it, Diego could and would kick his ass for it. 

“Hi, sweetheart,” Grace says the next day, her smile somewhat dimmer than usual. (Or maybe it is the opposite, shining as if she was in an old school ad, unnaturally white.) “Is it alright with you if I sit down?”

Five looks up from his cup. She waltzed earlier in this morning sporting striped suit pants and a beret she would have never dared look at back in the old days, and Diego frowned menacingly at them as he complimented her vehemently on her new look until they followed suit. Pogo is with her now, and Five hasn’t seen his face since yesterday night when he ate with them, exceptionally. He only nods at Five and walks over to pull up a stair for Grace.

Five guesses he is not doing much apart from gazing at the steam fade away and wondering if the caffeine is going to kick in and give him answers about life, death, the universe and everything in between anytime soon.

“I am pretty sure we already established that I don’t have anything to do with my life, so, feel free,” he says. His chuckle is mirthless and the bitterness on his tongue has nothing to do with coffee. 

It is late in the morning, one of those greyish sorts of mornings where the sky, half covered but not quite raining, seems to have a hard time deciding whether or not this would be a good day. Outside, Diego and Luther are jogging at what feels like an easy pace for them and is anything but for the rest of the human species. Ikea was weirdly tiring for a department store where the only thing they did was walk around and argue, and Five slept better than he had in years last night, although to be fair, he went to bed much later than usual after greasy fast food almost made him sick.

“Actually,” Grace starts again, and the words flow uneasily out of her mouth. “I wanted to ask you about something.”

“Oh,” Five says, taken aback. “You did?”

“Yes, if it is no bother, of course,” Grace says.

“Sure, go on.”

He takes a sip of his coffee, which has now grown lukewarm and disappointing, and almost spits it out when she says, not quite looking at him: “Why have you never used your name?”

For a while, he doesn’t know what to say - that’s a first, Diego mocks in his head. In the end, he settles on: “Why do you ask?” Then, as more doubts arise: “Does it bother you?”

“What, of course not, dear,” she says, and almost seems genuine doing so, as much as Grace can seem genuine anyway. “You know nothing you kids could do would ever bother me.”

“Because you can’t actually be bothered by anything,” Five can’t resist saying, and Grace falters. 

“No,” she says with more assurance. “Because I am your mother, and I will always be grateful for my beautiful, exceptional children. All of them.”

She isn’t smiling now, face dead set yet more human than it ever seems, her frown breaking the surreal prettiness that makes her seem every bit as carved in marble as she is. In this moment, Five understands why Diego wants to believe in her so much.

He almost wants to, too. 

He decides he doesn’t owe her any explanation but would like to give it to her anyway.

“It was different for me and for the rest of them,” Five tells her. “Diego, Luther - god, even Vanya - they always believed in the numbers so much. Like a middle schooler getting his or her grade - or like a rank, I suppose. We always were more of an army than an academy.”

“And you did not,” Pogo says. “Though I guess you were always more, well, discerning of Sir Hargreeves’ plans than most.”

“It is a nice way of saying I was always smarter than them,” Five says, not quite boasting. 

“Well, I don’t know about smarter, but you were always so bright,” Grace says, then, tenderly, in a way that makes him remember a thousand other times she told him so, with a hand on his cheek and a smile in her eyes, “my clever, clever boy.”

Because Five guessed it.

Five guessed it the day Diego threw a dart in a perfect, looping trajectory and then giggled in glee and pride until Reginald looked down at him and said,  _ finally a useful gift to have, Number Two. _ Though in a way he guessed it a hundred more times: when they were eleven and Allison went to the pharmacy with him and Klaus, who had another one of his splitting headaches, only to be told there wasn’t any migraine medicine left fit for a kid, and Allison whispered,  _ I heard a rumor they were some left on the shelf right behind you, would you mind checking again? _ and suddenly they had always been there. Every time Diego said he would make a better Number One before he fought twice as fiercely as usual. Every time Ben unbuttoned his uniform jacket with reluctant fingers to unveil more monsters. And now, as Vanya struggles just like their lost brother to keep so much power in such a fragile body, shackles of skin over a nuclear bomb. 

It was always obvious when you knew where to look.

“The numbers never mattered,” Five still says out loud. It is the first time he has ever done it. “They were always arbitrary, just another experiment, like measuring our brainwaves or how fast we could run. How is that different from a name?” 

“I think it is plenty different, actually,” Pogo says, and Five doesn’t understand why: when he tells him so, he looks sad but shakes his head instead of answering.

“Do you think your siblings know?” Pogo asks instead. He is hunched up again, ears dropping, even smaller and older than usual.

Five isn’t angry with him. There is no point in being so.

“They’re not as stupid as they seem. I don’t think any of them would take back their number, though.”

“Of course,” Grace says. Then, proudly: “Though I guess I should have known you would have named yourself - you always did like to drive us wild, even as a child.”

It shouldn’t make Five’s heart swell up against his ribcage, but then again, his ex-wife is a department store mannequin, so maybe refusing to a machine the right to be his mother is nothing short of arbitrary skepticism. 

In the end, maybe Pogo is right, maybe he isn’t sure he really named himself, but in any case, names are one of these things you didn’t get to choose, like the color of your eyes, your lactose intolerance, or your family. When Luther and Diego come to the kitchen all sweaty and arguing and they spread mud all over the tiles and Luther ruffles his hair in that way he loathes, Five doesn’t think to wonder if he would have chosen anything else - it’s a dumb question to begin with. 

 

It turns out Diego is absolutely useless with a hammer and a nail, to absolutely no one’s surprise but Diego’s.

“Listen,” he says, “get your tiny hands off my screwdriver, there’s no way-”

“Oh, so now it’s your screwdriver?” Vanya says mockingly. 

“It didn’t sound like your screwdriver when you threw a fit because you couldn’t find Dad’s old toolbox,” Five contributes from where he is laying on his bed, propped up on his elbows, book forgotten in favor of watching the spectacle in front of him with fascination. He bends over a little and brushes some sawdust off his black jeans. Somehow putting up a desk and a few shelves - alright, covering up his wall with shelves - turned his entire room upside down, which was an impressive feat considering that the only furniture in his room currently was a bed, a closet, and a big blackboard they had propped against the wall for future calculations. Maybe yet another one of Diego’s hidden powers, Five had suggested earlier, earning himself more glowering still. 

The walls are still blank. Five decided he liked them this way - he was never a big fan of colors anyhow. 

“You don’t even know how to hold it, Diego,” Vanya says. Her voice is every bit as hushed as usual, but she is rolling her eyes at him. 

“I am holding it just f-fine.”

“No, you’re not? You’re objectively not.”

“You do know that’s not a knife, right?” Five asks. “You can’t just throw it anywhere and hope it doesn’t miss.”

“It sure as hell wouldn’t miss you.” 

“It has missed that screw here, though,” Vanya says, soft but snarky as she pulls her sleeves over her hands. “Repeatedly.”

Diego sighs and his entire body tenses up as he leans his forehead against the wall, looking very much like he wants to bang his head against it instead. It is a tribute to his progress in anger management that Diego hasn’t stormed out of the room three quips ago. Five is impressed, truly. 

Next to him, Vanya slides under his armpit and tugs on the tool with a last  _ come on, let me at least try, right? _ and Diego astonishes Five by reluctantly letting her take it away from him. He would have never let anyone, let alone  _ Vanya _ of all people, do anything of the sort only a month ago. Then again for all his unflinchingness it seems Diego is about to cry out of sheer frustration, so it might be that he has finally met his match in the form of a flat-pack piece of furniture. David and Goliath couldn’t compare - this is what the bards will sing about, really.

Diego had been working on it for an hour. Once Vanya sets on building everything up, it goes way faster.

“How,” Diego asks her. “How are you doing that?”

“Uh, I’m following the instructions?” Vanya says. “Also I’m using the right tools. That helps.”

“But how do you know which ones-” Diego starts saying before he cuts himself.

“Mankind has mastered the use of tools in the Stone Age,” Five tells him. “But it’s alright if you’re a little behind.”

“Five,” Vanya says disapprovingly, hiding her smile by tucking her chin under her shirt collar. 

“Vanya,” he tells her in the same tone. She chuckles. 

“I’m going to go punch something, now,” Diego says. 

“Aw, do you think mindless violence will make you feel like a man again?” Five asks with innocent eyes. Diego makes a vaguely threatening move from where he is standing behind Vanya, then remembers she is between them and steps back.

“It sure could make you only half of one,” Diego says. 

“Nice one,” Five recognizes. Vanya slides under the desk and he should probably stop insulting his brother, but it’s so much more fun to pester him. “You got way better at trash talk since we were thirteen.”

“Someone had to, you weren’t there to constantly insult everyone,” Diego says. 

“Hex key,” Vanya says from the desk she is kneeling under and holds out her hand. Diego picks up something haphazardly, and he and Five look at each other in mutual confusion  _ (does this look like a key, what the fuck do I know, I don’t know don’t you know  _ everything,  _ fuck you, fuck you too) _ before she wiggles her fingers and he hands it to her with a beat of hesitation. It seems to serve her purpose, though.

Sometimes Five forgets that Vanya is, not well-adjusted, clearly, but adjusted at least. She is the only one of them who lived in her own place (not counting Allison, who never actually had to do menial chores in her fairytale of a life, or Diego, who lived on a pullout couch in a rented apartment he cleaned once a week), graduated from some sort of school, and all of these weird normal people experiences none of the others got to have. She doesn’t even realize how exceptional that is to the rest of them.

“Alright, that should hold up, I  _ think,” _ she says when she finally crawls out from under the desk and stands up, Diego offering a helpful hand automatically - Grace raised him right. There is sawdust all over her hair. “But, you know, I wouldn’t make any promises.”

“Still better than what Diego would have done.”

“Hey!” Diego protests.

“What?” Vanya asks and gestures at the desk. “Do you want me to dismantle it to try again?”

“No, it’s fine,” Diego grumbles. He leaves the room in a huff, and it occurs to Five that anyone but Vanya would have gotten in a fight for this. Vanya, unaware of the weird power her utter powerlessness (and now, in a way, her ticking, troubling timebomb potential) gives her on their family, just smiles and ducks her head. She burrows her hands deep in her jean pockets, and when she remembers that she has tools to put away and gets them out again, Five notices the red skin around her knuckles. 

“Are your hands alright?”

“What?” Vanya asks, looking up from where she is crouching next to the toolbox, and the hand that is not wrapped around a hammer sinks under her shirt sleeves self-consciously. “Oh, right. Diego is always on my ass about wrapping them more carefully. I don’t mind it so much, though.”

Five is almost sure it doesn’t sound healthy, but remains deeply unqualified to discuss these topics - he resolves to slide a word to Allison about this. He has to talk to her about some personal matter of his anyway. Instead, then, he tells Vanya: “Hey, I heard they are showing some pseudo-period movie downtown about Queen Anne of England, do you want to go and complain about the historical inaccuracies?”

She snorts. “Funny enough, in my memories, you were the only one who complained about them.”

“Wait, did I say complain? I meant provide entertaining and instructive commentary, of course.”

“Of course you did,” Vanya smiles. “But sure, it sounds nice.”

Rectifying mistakes in the past’s script. Not the most exotic pastime for him, but it does sound nice. He is glad Allison told him about the movie.

  
  


It should not be this nerve-wracking for him to stand behind his sister’s door. He has killed, after all, more than once, and been in fights with some of the most ruthless assassins one could know, not counting himself, of course. This is a different sort of hard, though.

He knocks on the door and waits for Allison to open. When she does, only a few seconds later, her notebook is open and saying: “Took you long enough. I was pretty sure you were going to stand here forever at that point.”

Five comes in without commenting on her sass. 

Now that he is inside, he realizes he can barely remember even one time he ever visited Allison’s room. When they were younger and they moved into their own rooms rather than the dormitory Reginald Hargreeves used to keep them in, Allison had talked her way into getting the room with the most light, the one with a big window on the south-facing wall of the mansion. With the translucent flower-patterned curtains she chose in her youth, in the daytime, the room remains bathed in this warm glow that makes the dust in the air dance and the mirror on her dressing table shine. 

It feels as weirdly claustrophobic as his old room did with the posters of corny pop bands popular when she was a teenager and the big cross stitch of parrots on her bed that she used to think was the height of sophistication. In front of the poster, cutting onto the pastel colors of the room and even Allison’s mauve blouse with the dark and monotone of her usual appearance, Vanya is sitting on the bed. Her hair is still wet from the shower she took when she and Diego returned from boxing practice, her eyelids still heavy from the nap his entrance just woke her up from. But Vanya doesn’t feel as out of place as she seems to Five’s eyes and Allison finds her room nostalgic rather than depressing, so maybe it is all a matter of perspective.

“What’s up, Five?” Vanya asks, words slurred by sleep.

“I was hoping to talk to you both, actually,” Five starts saying, before he stops, not unsure of what comes next, but reluctant to phrase it out loud. “I need… I’d like a recommendation from you two on a private matter.”

Vanya frowns, decoding his words in a half-asleep haze, and Allison, faster than her, writes down: “You need our help?”

She underlines the word  _ help _ a couple of times for good measure, and after a short hesitation, also underlines  _ you.  _ And  _ our.  _ She shows the page to him and raises her eyebrows, far too smug. He hates it already.

“I wouldn’t call it help,” Five insists.

“Assistance?” Vanya asks.

“Advice?” Allison finishes scribbling in record time to pull up the notebook.

“No, definitely recommendation.”

Allison’s smirk widens by the second, and he frowns even more deeply. His bruised ego never liked it much when Allison made fun of him, even in that good-natured way of hers, but it is even worse now that he has to wait for her to finish writing a sentence he knows it will make him try his best not to pout as if he was actually thirteen again. She looks up at him and something in his expression makes her take pity on him, or maybe just take him seriously, because she turns the page without showing him, sits down next to a still confused Vanya on the bed and gestures him to get started. A weight lodges around his throat but it is not like he can back down anyway. 

“I have been thinking,” he starts. “About what I should do after my time here back at the Academy. I have studied everyone’s case, of course, but came up short in my research when I realized that - no offense to my siblings - all of your lives seemed pretty miserable on the outside. There is the case of Diego leaving at seventeen and pretending he was older so he could get in the police academy just to interrupt his studies abruptly, or Klaus, well, I don’t think I have to remind you of Klaus’ life, or worse, Luther never even leaving at all-”

“Do you have a point?” Vanya asks tiredly. Allison tilts her head in approval and raises one perfect eyebrow -  _ what she said. _

“I do always enjoy a good monologue,” Five says, “but yes. My point is, you’re the only ones whose lives were… Well, you were miserable, of course, but at least you were miserable in your own apartment with your own money, which I guess is a relief to ordinary people. I never thought such small-minded considerations would start mattering to me, but having the comfort of security on my side seems like the smartest option.”

In front of him Allison squints, makes a face, and Vanya unknowingly mimics her, and for two persons who are not technically related, they have never been more alike. “Are you,” Vanya asks, “are you insulting us because you want our help?”

“I wouldn’t say help.”

Allison snorts.

“I wouldn’t. I just-!u I’m an expert in time travel, I have traveled all around the world, met fascinating people and cultures, and killed them-”

“Is that supposed to be a good thing,” Vanya points out, “or…” 

Allison holds up the sign she was painstakingly writing: “Didn’t you get your time travel maths wrong and end up stuck in your thirteen-year-old body?”

“Alright, you know what, I knew it was a bad idea to come,” Five bites. He starts stomping away in frustration, and slams the door on his way out, ignoring the small anguished noise Allison makes and the  _ no, wait, Five _ that Vanya calls out in a soft, sad voice. 

This was, in fact, a bad idea - a terrible one, because Five didn’t need any of his siblings to help him about anything when they were all so fucking dreadful at dealing with themselves. As that famously depressing Emily Carr quote said, he came into the world alone and that is the way he would go out, but the time in between was the loneliest of all. Not that Five minded - he was stranded in time for dozens of years, so maybe he excelled at isolation more than anything else. 

He locks himself in his room and yells at Luther when he knocks. 

 

His siblings do not seem to care much for any of his age-appropriate fit of angst, though.

Klaus barges without knocking in Five’s room about five times a day (which is wrong and bad but tragically ordinary) but chooses to do so in a distinctly unusual way that evening, a black plastic bag in one hand, hanging low against his leather-clad thigh, and even darker bags under his eyes. This is not what is unusual - what is unusual is Klaus’ demeanor when he does, the hesitation when he comes into his room, shoulders just a little hunched, eyes just a little downcast and shifty, sweeping the floor with each look.

Coming from him, this kind of behavior is trouble, and Five doesn’t like it. 

“What’s going on, Klaus?” Five says. “Who did you piss off again?”

His brother looks at him under unruly curls and his awkward demeanor reverts to normal. “What, so I can’t come and hang out with my baby brother, whom I love, because this is the sort of responsible positive influence I am?”

Five makes a disgusted face. 

“Boy, Vanya sure did good work in this room,” Klaus says, ignoring him and peering around them at the desk, the blackboard pinned up, finally, and the shelves covering up the walls, not quite filled up yet. It is pretty basic stuff, but leave it to Klaus to make anything and everything dramatic. “That’s impressive. Who knew that tiny woman was so butch, uh?”

“I’ll be sure to tell her all about your interior decoration praise next time I see her.”

“I sure hope so. I’m a paragon of good taste,” Klaus says, waving one arm around, making the bag bounce awkwardly with his movement.

“What’s up with the garbage bag?” Five asks, pretending not to be curious. “Did any of your siblings finally snap and decide to throw you out? If yes, may I watch you as you leave?”

“Why, of course! My goodbye party would be nothing if you didn’t wave your little handkerchief at me,” Klaus puts both his fist against his chest with fake tears in his eyes, “crying out in despair.”

“I was thinking more popcorn and party poppers, but you know,” Five says. “Nice work avoiding the question, by the way. Very subtle”

“Thank you, I thought so too!” Klaus says, beaming at him. Five is unimpressed by his theatrics.

He doesn’t tell Klaus so though - just waits a few seconds for the silence to tick by and Klaus to get antsy the way he usually does when it is quiet for too long. It doesn’t fail, of course, and eventually, Klaus reaches into the bag, pulls out some balled up fabric, and throws it in Five’s face as he begins his tirade.

“Anyway, I decided to learn knitting back when you told us the world was ending, because why not? It’s a useful skill to have in the apocalypse,” he shrugs off. “And, well, since you gave me the idea, and, if you don’t mind me saying, you’re in dire need of some embellishment in this empty, cold, closet space you call a room, I thought I’d help.”

Five stares at the wool in his hands for a beat too long before he unfolds it, slowly, into an uneven square, all black except for the blocky, splotchy letters spelling out  _ fuck off _ in trembling loops. 

His fingers are trembling too. He ignores them. “How did you do it so fast?” 

“Well, it’s not like I ever sleep anyway, and a guy got to keep busy when he is trying not to listen to the Victorian girl in the basement,” Klaus handwaves. “Candlelit baths for myself can only last for so long. Anyway, do you like it?”

He lets excitement shine through the last question, and Five remembers a younger Klaus, before his nihilistic, stoner persona, before he turned twelve, before Hargreeves effectively fucked them up, being as excited about stick people drawings and poorly cooked eggs and a comic book he and the other boys liked. 

Five shrugs and clears his throat at the same time, looks at Klaus’ shoulders rather than his face.

“Yeah, I guess it’s fine. I like the, uh, the black. And everything.” 

“Well, you know what they say. Black is the new black.”

“Is that what they say?” 

“Sure they do.”

There is an awkward beat and Five kicks the uneven floorboard a little. Klaus’ hands fiddle with a straw of wool hanging from his army jacket. This is as close to hugging as Five ever gets. 

“Anyway,” Klaus says forcefully, “I should go-”

“Oh, yeah, I have stuff to do to-”

“So many, uh, things-

“Yes.”

They run into each other in their scramble for the door until Five stops dead in his tracks, whips around, steps quickly to the bed. He lays the cover out on his bed, taking care to tuck its corners under the mattress and center it so that the _ fuck off  _ is in perfect display. As late in April as they are, he knows he will probably kick them off early in the beginning of the night. He isn’t sure he cares, though. 

Fives goes downstairs with Klaus, shuffling and not quite talking where Klaus expresses a lot of very loud and rambling opinions about the weather, the president’s current policy-making process, and floral arrangements. Five has no remorse cutting him in the middle of his sentence when they get to the bottom of the old, creaky stairs and into the living room.

“About your not sleeping issue-”

“Can’t take pills,” Klaus chuckles mirthlessly. 

“No, I wasn’t about to- you know, maybe the fact that pills are your first answer to any issue should also be worrying. What I wanted to say was, I don’t sleep much either, so maybe next time you can come over and check, and, if we are both not sleeping, we could do something. Plan your lessons earlier. Maybe nighttime really is better for ghosts. It’s always interesting to check on an urban myth.”

The spread of Klaus’ smile is slow and infectious. 

 

Five lasts a while without having to confront his problems again, until the sky above darkens and he is sitting by the fireplace, which is unlit not because of the fair weather - that has never stopped their mother - but because of the new flowers she put up on the mantel. One of them, a poppy red, is already starting to wilt. Five doesn’t feel like picking up his book of the week again, still meditating on the last sentence he read from Blaise Pascal  _ (nous ne nous tenons jamais au temps présent, nous ne vivons jamais, mais nous espérons de vivre _ \- he has been trying to brush up on his French since his last discussion with his mother and Pogo) and he just finished reading today’s newspaper, which has been hogged by Luther all day even though Luther didn’t even have time to read it. Five is now considering whether he wants to bring Vanya down for Scrabble or not, wondering why he is so reluctant to do so.

Of course, he is reminded of why exactly he was staying holed up in his room and which awkward conversation he was avoiding when Allison plops down on the couch uncomfortably close to him, props up her elbow on the back of the couch, and stares at him with intent. Five sighs as he turns to face her. Right under the candelabra light, she leans even closer and frowns a little and he can see the shadow her eyelashes draw on her cheekbones, the downward curl at the turn of her lips.

“Oh, so do you wish to speak to me, dear sister?” he asks, unbothered. “Do you have something to say, maybe?”

Alright, it  _ is _ a low blow, but it is all he has got right now. Lucky for him, Allison remains unaffected, only raising unimpressed brows at him, and Luther is nowhere in the vicinity to be offended for her. Vanya though, who sits down on the armchair in front of them with her legs spread, elbows resting on her knees so that her arms are laying in between them, frowns on behalf of their sister. Her boot toes the carpet and there is a slight ruffle of wind outside, but she chooses to say nothing about it. Instead, when she speaks up, her voice is steadier than usual as she apologizes - the apologizing is a constant with Vanya, but the confidence of it isn’t.

“Five, we’re sorry it looked like we were dismissing your issues earlier. We didn’t mean to, but it made you feel like you weren’t listened to, so... It sucked.” The last bit is obviously not part of the speech she prepared, but Allison nods in approbation. “We want to h- to do what we can to, uh, give you our recommendations on whatever question you might have. Really.”

Five considers them for a moment, Vanya with her ducked head and the golden freckles on her face and the way her eyes grew wider and darker when she was vulnerable, Allison with her tentative smile and earnest expression and the way she turns softer when she tries to help these days, more real, maybe. They make him softer too, in a way the Handler would chide, would classify as weakness and scoff at, in a way Delores, who was, he knows it, only a lifeboat of a daydream when there wasn’t much else to care for, in a way that makes everything in his killer instincts and his DNA protest. 

“I need help filling up the forms to pass my SATs,” he admits. Talking hurts like trying to spit out venom and like breathing in cold December air at the first snow of the year. He goes on anyway. “And also, I know Vanya talked about courses you can follow by mail, but I couldn’t find anything about them at the library - even if I can’t have them by mail, I am pretty sure I just need to go through the textbooks to figure it out. It’s high school, so it’s not like it’s hard.”

For a few seconds, neither of the girls speaks, until Allison writes something in her notebook and there is only the noise of her pen scratching - “I’m going to hug you now.”

“Please don’t,” he says as if she cared. 

He is stiff against her with her arms thrown around him, and this cannot be enjoyable in any way for her, but she does so anyway. Five closes his eyes and sighs. He knew about the risks when he made that decision. 

“I think it’s really great, Five,” Vanya says, and when he opens his eyes she is smiling, arms around her knees propped up against her chest, boots dirtying the chair in a way that would make Reginald Hargreeves bemoan them and send them up to their room. But he isn’t there anymore, and the Commission hasn’t shown up despite being bound to eventually, and maybe Five has better things awaiting him than wondering when the next fight will be.

After all, waiting in anguish for anything to happen is plain silly for a time traveler. And Five is as proficient in improvising than he is in planning anyway. It is time he stops missing out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you’re wondering which subtle, hidden message is the quote from the French book Five is reading, it’s a philosophy book which says _“we never hold on to the present, we never live, yet we hope to live”._ of course then the writer says that it means we’ll never be happy and we need to find God but let’s skim over that part uh
> 
> louise's valuable commentaries of the chapter were too great and i'm tired and i can't pick one but they were there and i might talk about them again later because god. the meta
> 
> as of now my tumblr is vanya-hargreeves-apologist and i’m always here to Screm please join me 
> 
> this is where i put a witty invitation to leave comments usually because i love it when i get a notif at my internship and start crying because of how sweet y’all are, but i actually have also other very real questions/messages for you guys like:
> 
> 1 - i’m going to make a lil side fic of all the bits that didn’t get into the final draft of the chapters (there’s… a Lot….) so if you’re into that follow the series 
> 
> 2 - i’m kind of working on a band!au (specifically a prim8s!au) and hogwarts!au on the side and like. would anyone be into that? should i keep it a guilty pleasure for me and beta extraordinaire louise? please tell me
> 
> 3 - and also i was wondering!! who do you think is gonna be the focus of the next chapter? i know some of you thought this one would be allison because diego was number three last time, and others are asking for klaus, so i was curious of what you thought hmm


	6. allison i

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hi Allison,” Vanya says, a sort-of-smile on her face. “What are you doing?”
> 
> Allison can feel her own lips curl around the corners as she brandishes a little red Uno box and waggles her eyebrows. If Diego groans in the background, it’s just because he’s a spoilsport.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *spongebob card* one month later...
> 
> i’m not giving up on this life is just being a real pain in the ass right now, so the update schedule is going to be wayyy slower from now on, so sorry!! 
> 
> yes i’ve had to write some luther/allison content for this chapter, no i’m not ok with it, at least there's a stealth sense8 reference
> 
> allison’s playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0JpmKJ4UU2Xs5ffzO9v1fe 
> 
> friendly reminder that this quote from klaus exists and wrecked me:  
>  _“Number Three… Escaped into superstardom the way I escaped into drugs.”_

Before the end of the world, before her husband left her, before her daughter grew up to prefer stories of the Umbrella Academy to anything else, Allison used to read fairy tales to Claire to get her to sleep. She remembered Grace telling her the same stories until she was far too old to be begging for a bedtime story but did so anyway, always looking so beatically happy in those few moments. Unlike Luther and Diego, and Klaus and Ben, she slept alone - Dad would have never let anyone sleep in the same room as Vanya, for reasons she now understands - and sometimes it could feel so lonely, for a young girl, the gigantic emptiness of the castle. She would dream up of knights who would save her, ask for Mom to braid her hair until she was eleven, _let down your hair so, that I may climb thy golden stair,_ but she remembers even now that Vanya’s favorite was always Ariel.

Of course, that means it was barely ever the one Grace would narrate for them in these very early days where she would get them all huddled together as she told them stories, which is maybe why Allison always liked to tell this one to Claire better. Maybe that is why Claire always used to ask for it when she was wee foot tall.

The first time Allison gets to call her daughter, for real this time, on doctor’s orders and with Claire’s father’s reluctant acceptance, it’s almost awkward - she hasn’t gotten to hear her daughter talk for that long in years - and even if she is too old for this, even if Allison can’t actually speak, Claire says it’s late now and asks for a story about Ariel. This if of course after she pesters them for half an hour about their most recent adventures and what all of her siblings are like, and Luther chuckles as he talks to her about space. There is something tender and fragile pushing against Allison’s ribcage as she watches Luther try to clumsily recall the story and end up getting corrected by Claire and herself more often than not.

Luther’s voice breaks when they get to the point where Ariel loses hers, and the irony of this isn’t lost on Allison.

She cries herself to sleep that night when Vanya is asleep already, lying on Allison’s bed the way she did more nights than not because it was the only way Allison knew for sure her sister would sleep. Soon she will push up Five’s old bed against hers to make more room, she thinks, as her arm goes numb and she needs a tissue and she still doesn’t move. She reasons that she has no reason to wake her sister up for this. Vanya sleeps so little these days, it would just be callous of her - and after all, Allison is the one who rubs circles on her sister’s back and tells her _you’ll be alright,_ not the other way around.

But even then, even as Allison doesn’t tell anyone, even as for weeks her throat feels sliced open all over again every time she has much as inhales, more than anything else, she is grateful they stole her voice.

 

“Of course I’m not _relieved,”_ she lies to her therapist when he asks her with disconcerting accuracy. “Why would I be?”

Her therapist mouths the words he reads whenever she hands him her replies on little sheets ripped from the last notebook Grace bought while grocery shopping. The scene always makes Allison feel weird and uncomfortable, but she is not about to tell him so.

To be fair, Allison has been to enough appointments in her life to guess what he would say: she doesn’t need him to tell her so to know the way she deals with recent events is unhealthy, to know it is unfair, thank you very much. And yet - yet he wouldn’t understand anyway how good it feels to go through the day without worrying constantly about what she might say, without the knowledge that she could shape anything and anyone into what she wanted, without the temptation of it, really.

She remembers once as a teenager making a small, white lie about needing to go to the library so she could go see a movie with her favorite actress. She ended up on a bus ride with her tiny fingers clammed around a library card with her picture on it that she could have sworn didn’t belong to her. It had taken work to use her voice, sure, but it had taken much more to teach herself how to not use it - how to lie the way normal people did.

“So you feel bad about it?” her therapist asks.

She nods her yes and thinks he is about to inquire about what exactly these bad feelings are, to word it out, something she is prepared to do ever since she showed up at his office with Luther in tow to make her first appointment. He hadn’t been the first therapist she had screened in the city, and was the only one who was both agreed upon by her ex husband, the judge, and herself.

Instead he says: “So then, it must be terribly difficult not to hold a grudge about your sister?”

Allison wants to make a joke about being shocked silent, but it would probably be a little too dark for that crowd.

This is what she wants to explain: losing her voice is a relief and a burden in the same way willing herself to stop using her powers had been after Patrick left, only, maybe, a sharper one. There are times when she misses it fiercely, like a blackhole instantly filled by a brighter, fiercer wave of guilt over being so selfish about something so dangerous.

This is what she wants to tell him about: about how the floor of the cave was cold and humid and one of her arms was going numb under her sister’s weight and their brothers were whispering that they needed to get out of here and Vanya sobbed against her shoulder and held onto her as if Allison could steer them towards safety in any way, as if Allison could do _anything_ apart from kissing her forehead and whispering sweet nothings. For a second there Allison thought the salty water on her tongue was seawater.

Instead she mouthed _it’s going to be fine, you’re going to be alright_ against Vanya’s hair, holding her tightly enough so she might not feel as if she was breaking apart still, and it had been years since the last time she made a wish and it came true, but somehow she hoped just this once they would get it right.

None of that mattered. Vanya was there and she was safe and she was terrified and it was one of these perfect moments and it was one of the worst times in Allison’s life.

Now, waking up in the middle of the night to Vanya’s frail body tucked against hers in a way that forces Allison to stretch uncomfortably, finally sleeping at last for a few fitful hours that would feel like rest to neither of them, she kisses her forehead again like she used to when Claire had a nightmare. Her sister is alright, except for all the ways she is not.

Instead she says that their father got it all wrong when he said Allison could convince people of believing in what was not there. She knows it now, as an adult, that a moment can be perfect and terrible and someone can be alright and still in pain and that she can understand why her sister hurt her and how it was her fault, really but still mourn for her sliced throat. He nods and scribbles something down on a notebook of his own and she can’t help feeling like she failed a test she didn’t know she was passing.

 

“How was it?” Five asks, noisy as ever, when Allison gets into the passenger seat of a car Luther is driving.

She had to rush to them because it was raining heavily and she did not spend that much time on her makeup just to see it ruined, thank you very much. Even now, in their father’s old car with the pine air freshener smell fighting off cigarettes and perfume and a mess of CDs they could never agree on, the drumming of rain on the roof washes out the sound of the radio.

Luther shuffles awkwardly at the question - he knows she doesn’t like to discuss it - and she frowns at Five because why is he there again? Her face must convey what her voice does not because he just shrugs.

“Moral support,” he says, which is an obvious lie. “Also I was bored and I needed to get some books for my,” his nose crinkles in disdain and he spits the next words, “SAT preparation.”

In spite of her weariness after a long session filled with silences _(ha)_ and the way her hair is sticking to her head, heavy with rainwater, Allison can’t help but beam at him. He scoffs her off. Luther glances at her and starts smiling as well, just a little, and Five frowns even deeper.

“Don’t say a word,” he tells Luther.

“I wasn’t going to,” Luther says innocently.

“Of course you weren’t.”

“You know, you really shouldn’t be so rude to the guy driving you home in the rain.”

“It’s barely even rain,” Five says, “More like a drizzle. I was in a tsunami once. I won’t bother you with the details, because it’s a long story, filled with intertemporal assassinations and bodyguards trained in martial arts, so you wouldn’t understand anyway, but I’m not afraid of getting my hair a little wet.”

She almost puts her hand on Luther’s arm to tell him to let their brother have the last word, and is halfway there really before she changes her mind and puts it back on her own lap, but Luther, oblivious, just smiles at Five as the boy crosses his arms and slouches in the backseat.

Allison thinks about that missed touch all the way back to the mansion, then walking away from the car as Five space-jumps to the door to avoid the “drizzle” and Luther takes out an umbrella and bends down to cover her too. They are so close his cologne drowns out the smell of rain in the city. She edges farther and wills herself to forget about it. She has more than enough on her plate trying to qualify to get her daughter back, to figure out what she is going to do with her life now that she is an actress who can’t speak, to deal with her siblings’ various trauma-riddled personas. This - whatever this is, a mess, really, of feelings and missed connections and missed opportunities and absence and grudges - this doesn’t even come second as much as it comes fourth or fifth.

If she lingers a bit too long on the porch, it is just to let it go before she walks back in. She takes off her leather jacket (which, upon further inspection, smells a bit too much like weed to be hers) and hangs it up neatly on the coat rack.

 

Although, if she is really honest with herself, dealing with her siblings doesn’t take a lot of Allison’s time, which is surprising as they have the collective emotional maturity of a toddler, but not so much since they’re also emotionally stunted adults who could never ask for help.

Allison provides it anyway. Part of it is making amends, but part of it is genuine care, and so, one afternoon when Diego and Vanya are still out and she is done washing her hair, she has an idea and goes down the stairs from her room.

Five is sitting at the big dinner table, arguing with Luther about something or another. Five is much more passionate about this than Luther, who is in the middle of the world’s heaviest sigh, leaning on his elbows set on the table as Five sits up straight and looks like he is seconds away to sticking his fork in the oak of Grace’s brand new table. (The last one having been, of course, destroyed by Vanya weeks ago. The mansion is a dangerous place where all furniture dies, but Grace seems to enjoy this more than anything else.) The topic of their argument probably used to be about one of these very serious issues they “secretly” worked on, but somewhere along the way it turned into petty rows about laundry the way it always did. As if any of these two did their own laundry anyway, the morons.

Allison only hovers for a second in the entrance before she makes a decision and climbs down to the kitchen.

She really shouldn’t be so surprised to find Klaus here.

“Hello, my darling sister,” he says from where he is laying face down on the kitchen table. “What’s up?”

He has to raise his head a little to see her holding a note - “Not even going to ask” and then he shrugs and lies back down.

Allison walks further along the kitchen. She only stops next to the dartboard they were forbidden to use ever since the New Year 2001 incident, besides the empty freezer which used to be full of multicolored ice cream - they rarely ever had the right to touch it of course, but the sight of it was almost as good as the taste, in Allison’s opinion - in front of the heavy shelves of light honey-colored wood where a mess of old toys and pea shooters and blunt knives stood.

Unlike _some_ of her hoarder siblings, Allison isn’t one to hold any interest for broken, used possessions, though: she knows exactly what she is looking for, crouching to pull out a red box and foraging through piles of junk. Wow, Grace didn’t ever throw out anything when they left, not the old Monopoly board disfigured with stabs, not the empty turtle shell, not even the few darts Pogo didn’t find in his quest to throw every last one of them out.

It sort of breaks Allison’s heart.

“What _is_ up?” Klaus repeats, appearing by her side jack-in-the-box style.

She is used to it enough not to startle and punch him in the face like last time (hey, that’s what you got for surprising a trained fighter and, more importantly, world-class actress), but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t close her eyes and furrow her brows and take a deep, calming breath. She doesn’t bother with picking up her notebook and answering him.

“Do you just enjoy digging in garbage?” Five asks, standing at the door, where he appeared at some point, because it is _Give Allison a heart attack_ day today, apparently. “Because that would actually explain a lot about your taste in men.”

Luther, who is right beside him bending down to fit the frame of the door and still looking twice as tall and thrice as large as their brother in front of him, protests with a half-hearted “Hey!” that conveys more weariness than anything else.

“Come on, Five, don’t be so insulting,” Klaus reproaches, earning himself a grateful look from Luther before he adds: “This isn’t a _garbage_ box. It’s full of valuable objects and, more importantly,” he crosses his fists against his heart, “fond, loving memories, like the corpse of Diego’s first kill, still warm from his desperate attempts to throw down with Ben.”

“What the hell are you talking about-” Five begins before Klaus brandishes a beaten up Monopoly board that basically crumbles in his hands as he does. “Oh, right. You know what, that was a good use of our weekly half-hour of fun.”

“Yeah,  don’t really regret any of it,” Luther says. “Do you remember when Vanya told Diego he had to give her money and he refused and Dad talked to him for an hour about tax evasion?”

“Boy, that kid sure didn’t understand shit about Monopoly, but at least he was educated about white collar crimes,” Klaus says.

“A glaring dysfunction of our economic system,” Luther parrots, and he meets Allison’s eye as he chuckles.

“That’s what got him into the police academy for sure,” Klaus says. “Don’t say Dad never taught us anything useful.”

“He got kicked out,” Five points out.

“Yeah, you know, Dad was pretty shit,” Klaus says.

Five lets out a short, clipped laugh, and Luther startles uneasily but doesn’t correct him. He is gradually getting used to the idea that their father was a terrible person and an even worse parent, that even if maybe he cared about them in his own small, messed up way, in the end, it didn’t matter a bit when he spent his life making them miserable.

Allison sort of wants to hug him right now. She also wants to embrace Klaus with his nihilistic humor and Five with his bitterness even as he smiles.

She tells her mother instinct to shut up and anything else that might rear up its ugly head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re right,” someone announces, and Luther and Five turn around to find Diego standing behind them, temples glistening with sweat and dark hair sticking up on top of his head. At his side, Vanya is still red-cheeked and her eyes are gleaming even as she unties her mussed hair - when she has blood rushing up to her cheeks and a bruise down on her shoulder, she looks more alive than Allison has ever seen her.

“We’re talking about you getting kicked out of police academy,” Five informs him, because the boy cannot resist an occasion to be smug.

“Oh,” Diego says. “Fuck you then.”

Luther glowers at him like he is one to reprimand anyone about their language, but visibly swallows back his words through what Allison is sure must be a great ordeal for him as Vanya slides under his shoulder and walks towards Allison. Diego is still not used to Luther trying not to be as antagonising (read: jerkish) as he usually is and keeps being weirded out every time he avoids confrontation, which is Diego’s main mode of communication in all situations. To avoid showing weakness, he strides to the fridge and pulls out a beer that Allison didn’t even know was there, and is very out-of-place in their childhood home.

He pops it open with a knife and leans against the fridge after immediately offering an orange juice box at a particularly fidgeting Klaus’ request.

“Hi Allison,” Vanya says, crouching on her level, a sort-of-smile on her face. “What are you doing?”

Allison can feel her own lips curl around the corners as she brandishes a little red Uno box and waggles her eyebrows. If Diego groans in the background, it’s just because he’s a spoilsport.

In the end, Allison has a foolproof method to convince Diego to join them for a revival of a game night tradition their family certainly never had. By which she means she only has to bat her eyelashes for Luther to cave, and then she plays with Diego’s competitive streak for all of three seconds before he sits down on the tiled floor with them, the grim frown of a Spartan about to enter the arena on his face. It’s almost too easy.

That night Vanya is still smiling as she sits next to Allison on the bed, and Allison can just shrug helplessly because, well, _men, am I right?_ And it feels pretty great that she doesn’t have to speak for her sister to start giggling as she throws herself on Allison’s pillows.

That night again Allison coaxes Vanya into sleeping in her room with the pretext of yet another girls’ night, even though neither of them is fooled for a second. She paints Vanya’s nails black the way she did Klaus’ when they were children, and for a second she pictures Vanya’s eyes shining the way they did when she watched them do it, feverish with envy, before she realizes it is just her lamp’s reflection.

When Vanya finally falls asleep just to frown in her sleep, whimpers in her throat, Allison wakes up and runs her fingers in her hair like she did to chase away Claire’s own nightmares and mouthes _you’re alright you’ll be alright_ and misses her voice and is ashamed.

She falls back asleep and knows that she is going to be woken up in a few hours by Vanya trying to discreetly get up with her eyes still glistening with tears and failing, that she will get down in the kitchen and make her tea until Vanya is calm and grounded if not able to fall back asleep, before Allison finally gets to finish her own night.

It is fine by her - she has been both a star and a mother for a months-old child, after all, so what is so hard about odd sleeping patterns? She only wishes Vanya would stop apologizing so much about everything. It would save them all a lot of time.

 

“I’m sorry,” Vanya says, trying very hard not to laugh. Allison shoots her a disappointed look that no one - even herself - takes seriously.

Because the thing is, Allison might not fare as well as she pretends to in regards to her condition, but in many ways, she thinks her agent is the one who got the worse deal out of all of this. She feels a bit sorry for the woman. She would feel a whole lot sorrier if she didn’t receive a daily call (she _literally_ cannot talk) and weekly letters from her, though.

The weekly letters are what Vanya is sorry about. Especially when they are filled with words like _dog cop movie?_ or _about your stance on nudity-_

“This one is heavy,” Five says, weighing up one big, Manila envelope with a whistle. They are just about to start eating lunch, and everyone is there for once. Today’s meal is shakshuka, because Grace likes to try out dishes based on everyone’s origins.

One memorable time when they were eleven, she made snails in honor of Five, which led to everyone being grossed out apart from Klaus, who fared pretty well and slid most of their food onto his own plate when they thought no one was looking.

Allison doesn’t bother reminding her that she was technically born in Virginia, as far from Northern Africa as one could go, hence the _very_ American name - it is a bit late to change her mother’s programming after all.

(Reporters had tracked down her family in Virginia once, when she was the brightest star in Hollywood - she flew all the way across the country to meet them with a heart swelling with hope - and her mother was a nice, old woman with a tiny hairdressing business and a warm smile so unlike anything Allison had known growing up that she couldn’t bring herself to tell her anything. She just tipped her a lot more than she needed to for the cut and left.)

Every once in a week’s time one of her siblings remembers that the outside world exists and thinks to pick up the mail. Today, that person is Five, who is still waiting to receive some acknowledgment of the form he sent out to pass his SATs in June. Allison is incredibly proud of him and told him so - well, wrote him so - a few days ago, which led to him being embarrassed and snarky. She accepts this now as the mark of any of her emotionally stunted siblings feeling an emotion that isn’t anger, bitterness, or self-righteousness.

She still hugged him despite his complaints. He didn’t teleport out of her reach, which she counts as progress.

In one hand, Five carries Allison’s mail, and in the other everyone else’s. Somehow Allison’s half is still the heaviest by far. He throws all of their mail on the table, and immediately, he and the rest of the family start focusing on her pile rather than checking their own junk, because they are terrible, terrible siblings.

“Bingo! A letter from an admirer slash stalker,” Klaus says with an insultingly violet sheet of paper in one hand and making victorious jazz hands with the other.

“Weak,” Diego says, sliding another thick brown envelope towards himself. “This one is a script from a movie called _Drive-By Chronicles: Sidewayz._ Sideways spelled with a _z_ at the end.”

Klaus doesn’t seem too sad about his defeat, too busy cracking up until he falls off his chair as Diego picks a few select lines from the script. Allison is almost certain he is making it up to be worse than it actually is.

“Guys,” Luther says disapprovingly in his leader voice, and Allison is about to smile at him gratefully when he adds: “Obviously the winner here is me, with a special invitation to guest star in the sequel of _I Feel Pretty.”_

Allison gasps and punches him in the shoulder with no real heat, and Luther just laughs harder and smiles at her, an actual open-mouthed smile that makes his entire face light up, and it’s like the sun is lighting up in her head and it’s like being a teenager with a crush on the boy living in the next room all over again. She has to force herself to take her eyes off of him when Vanya makes a squeaky noise about Allison being invited to audition for a role in an arthouse movie.

Later in the afternoon she ends up borrowing Diego’s voice to call her agent for her and, as expected, it goes terribly, since Diego has the diplomatic skills of a hermit who hasn’t seen another human being in decades. At least they have fun doing so. (Well, Allison has fun. Diego looks remarkably constipated.)

She tells her therapist about it that evening, showing him her journal with pride at first, then the awkwardness that always comes with waiting for him to finish reading as he hums and aws. For once he seems just as happy with her as she is.

When she tells Vanya about it, she rolls her eyes at her and says with fondness in her smile: “Of course you are trying to be good at _therapy.”_

It is not meant to sting as badly as it does. Alison swallows down the tightness around her throat and smiles back anyway.

 

She is, in fact, trying to be good at therapy. Which she tells her therapist all about, once she exhausted her main way of communicating with him, which was repeating the same conversations she had with her old therapist back in Los Angeles so that she already knew what the right answers were.

“The thing is,” she writes, “I’m not sure if I’m trying to be good at therapy because I know it’s the best thing for me even though it is I know it is, of course, or if it’s because I need to be good at everything I do, all the time, pathologically.”

“Pathologically is a strong word to use, you know,” he tells her. She raises her eyebrows at him because, really? He smiles before he goes on: “Well then, you also know there’s no such thing as being good at therapy. There’s only being honest. So why would you try being good at it?”

She wants to laugh because asking her to be honest is like - asking her _father_ to be honest. Then she remembers how much she pays for this tiny office with its walls shining white and the cramped window giving ample view on a backyard garden and a picture of an elephant in a frame on the wall and the bookshelves filled with names like _The Psychology of Influence and Persuasion,_ which is just hysterical, and _Quiet,_ which is very much not. Maybe laughing at him isn’t the best idea when he is, after all, the one who gets to say when she will be able to reunite with her daughter.

Eventually, she settles on something that is only half a lie: “Because being good at things is what I do.”

His expression doesn’t shift as he reads her note but she is used to people enough to see something like inquisition in his eyes when he says, carefully disinterested: “Is that why you are so frustrated with sign language?”

Allison shrugs and carefully doesn’t glance at the ticking clock on the left side of his head, its hand moving towards the end of the hour. They both know it isn’t.

 

It took a matter of minutes for Grace to download sign language at their local library, and Five pointedly reads a book called _Signing Made Easy_ in the living room curled up on a chair as Klaus leans above his shoulder and comments on the differences with German sign language (the one he learned in a long and complicated story that involved way too many hallucinations for her to follow and led to Five declaring Klaus definitely hopeless) just a bit too loudly to be natural, and Allison takes great pain to ignore them.

Vanya tries to talk to her about it once, while they are both busy doing nothing in her room, saying they could learn together, and Allison promptly shuts her down. She doesn’t mention it again but the stricken look on her face back then and the guilt that follows her like a black cloud every day do it for her.

Luther, though, isn’t so easy to deter from doing anything he sets his mind on.

“Allison,” he begins, and she hates the way she mellows when he says her name. “Come on.”

She stares at him as icily as she can, but it only makes him bristle and stare back even more earnestly, all wide blue eyes and slack jaw, as his big hands clumsily sign her name. It is so utterly Luther, to have started teaching himself even as she said she wanted nothing to do with it, stubborn as ever, that it is hard to keep her annoyed front up - luckily for her, she has more than enough anger to spare.

(It is the same stubbornness he had back when they were fourteen and Allison kept a notebook filled with paper clippings of her, her interviews and photos and headlines, pasted meticulously with glitter glue and a pen with pink feathers on it - she remembers reading the advice given in a fashion magazine and pushing her food around her half-eaten plate so her father wouldn’t notice, telling herself she was starting her first diet because that was what stars did. Most of all she remembers Luther sneaking into her room with contraband food they weren’t allowed to eat, not leaving, not laughing, the same obstinate expression on his face, _what are you going to do, use your power on me?)_

She picks up her notebook pointedly to write down: “So this was what you meant when you said we should get coffee.”

To his credit, they do have Thermos of coffee with them, on the pretty blanket Allison spread in the middle of the park, behind that row of bushes that can shield a pair of gangly teens from the outside just right and makes her feel weirdly nostalgic. They are not shielded from anything now, especially with how ridiculously tall Luther is - he took so long to sit down, awkward as he ever is whenever he is not fighting and being a force of nature all on his own, before he settled on sitting cross-legged with his head in his hands, elbows propped up on his knees. It is just warm enough outside that even as she has goosebumps under the light cotton of her sweater he must be terribly uncomfortable under his cardigan and overcoat, but he isn’t complaining.

“You know, if you were signing, this would be much easier,” he points out, and she has to look up from where she is, lying down with her chest next to his legs, propped up on her elbows, so she can properly roll her eyes at him. “We would actually talk.” (This isn’t the first time they have had this discussion, every time with another piercingly honest technique: “we’re all worried,” “there’s a class downtown,” “I miss talking to you.”)

She ignores his attempt and rips another page to tell him he should take off the overcoat.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure no one wants that,” he says, glancing at the grass around them where teenagers are playing spin the bottle with a still full bottle of Diet Coke, which promises to turn into a real disaster soon enough. (Don’t they have class? What are their parents doing? Is Allison becoming one of those moms?)

Allison waggles her eyebrows and he groans and looks away from her. He is chuckling, though, and she is pretty sure she could see a blush was it not for the stubble on his cheeks. They still haven’t talked about the elephant in the room - not like they can have any sort of intelligent conversation, not like this - and Allison is not sure she wants to. She is not sure what she would even say.

“I don’t care that you don’t want to learn sign language,” he says with the forcefulness of someone who cares a great deal. “But can’t you even tell me why?”

She knows that were she to explain it to him, he would still try to convince her to learn anyway. It’s just who Luther is. And Allison cares for him, she really does, but she doesn’t think he would understand - she doesn’t think any of her siblings could really. So instead she leans back against the ground with her head in his lap and tugs at his hand until he starts braiding her hair the way she taught him when they were fifteen and starving for any good reason to touch each other, because she feels like being fifteen again for today.

She rests her eyes for what feels like only a second. The gaggle of teenagers’ laugh echoes a few steps away, and she can feel blades of grass poke her exposed calves and, brushing against her face, rays of sunshine and Luther’s gaze.

When she opens her eyes again, Luther’s thigh pulls away from under her head. She blinks groggily at Pogo, who is distinctly apologetic as he steals a reluctant Luther away for something which is no doubt important and world-changing.

“Sorry, there’s just a, uh, thing,” Luther says awkwardly.

(She remembers pouting and tightening her hold on his arm and saying there was always a thing, petulant in that way attention-starved teenagers are - pretty much exactly like being fifteen again then. She ignores the urge and lets it go.)

When he walks away there is a downtrodden weight on his shoulders as he leaves behind his joyful mood and a thick book that spells out, of course, _Signing Made Easy._

Allison stares at it far too long, unmoving. With no one else around but the still-laughing kids and a Thermos of tepid coffee, she opens it up.

She only stops reading when it gets too dark for her squinting to be enough and Luther has still not returned. There is movement on the side of the teenagers though, with the triumphant arrival of a boy who looks like every guy Allison dated at their age (which is about as far from a compliment as she can get) with at least two packs of beer. She hesitates as she gets up and rolls up her dirty blanket to put in a bag so expensive its designer would have an aneurysm if she knew what is was being used for.

Eventually, maybe it is the promised motherhood instinct that pulls her towards them or maybe plain curiosity - but she holds her breath as she signs, clumsy and definitely misspelling a word or another, _I heard a rumor…_

(Her father always used to wonder whether their powers were of the physical sort or something more even. At least now she has one last chance to prove him wrong.)

 

When Allison gets home that night, Five is pestering Diego so that he lets him in on his evening excursions, which Diego balks at. Allison understands of course that they are just being morons - Diego because he is not used to working with anyone anymore and unwilling to try, Five because he thinks he is being looked down on and patronized - but she is weary and unable to tell them so anyway, so she just goes down into the kitchen. Waves of music resonate around her, bouncing and trippy in a way that she has learned defined Klaus’ music tastes and sure enough, when she opens the door, Klaus is languidly moving on David Bowie. Vanya is cutting vegetables with dedication next to Grace and only occasionally breaks out in shy smiles at Klaus’ most ridiculous, over-the-top moves.

Allison doesn’t think she has ever seen Vanya cook anything since they were seventeen, except for the sandwiches she made Five, which barely even register as food. They were more like nuclear waste, in Allison’s very educated opinion. On the other hand, she has never seen Klaus cook anything in his life either, and he still seems to have a lot of opinions regarding the ideal osso bucco recipe.

As soon as he catches her eye, he wiggles his eyebrows and points a daunty finger at her,  then at what, according to what he mouths, must be the _dancefloor_. She laughs without a sound, but it doesn’t hurt as much as usual, drowned in the sound of the radio.

Klaus is a better dance partner than most people in this house, even if he insists she has to lead and kicks up his legs with way too much enthusiasm considering his actual physical shape. Allison can’t pretend it doesn’t warm her heart to turn around and see Vanya shuffling in a few awkward steps with clenched fists and a reluctant smile next to Grace with her swirling skirt. They switch partner once or twice or four times and for a while it’s a twirl of Klaus’ laugh resonating in the room and Allison tipping Grace with bravado and Vanya putting an experimental hand on Allison’s shoulder and another in her hand and stepping on her shoes with socked feet as she fails to learn how to waltz. It’s a scene out of a musical, she thinks, basked in the golden light of the chandelier and in the warmth of her fondness, and she has always been better at them than reality.

(Allison doesn’t tell her therapist about what did or didn’t happen with the teenagers anymore, and she doesn’t think about sign language anymore either.)

Later even, after a dinner animated by the enthusiastic and very exaggerated reenactment of Vanya’s dance moves by Klaus, Allison catches his eyes and taps a finger against her leather jacket’s left chest pocket. He waggles his eyebrows, _oh, me?_ and bounces towards her then up the stairs to her bedroom.

She opens the window before she pulls out the little white-and-gold cardboard box of her cigarettes.

“Should you really be smoking these?” Klaus points out even as he steals one from her offered fingers. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not the kind of guy who’ll keep you from your own self-destructive tendencies - pot, kettle, and all that - _ah!_ Pot, that’s fitting - but Luther will be absolutely pissed if his super-enhanced monkey-man senses smell even a whiff of nicotine.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“What? We don’t know what Pogo’s blood did to him,” Klaus protests. “Have you ever read one of these comic thingies they sold next to ours? Because, well, of course I didn’t, I’m not some kind of nerd with no self-respect, but our dear friend Benny - may God rest his angel soul - did, and I must tell you, that Peter Parker was up to some _frrreaky_ spider shit.” Beat. “Uh, yeah, he absolutely was. I’m telling you. Nobody gets that flexible and then doesn’t use it for fun hot sexy times. Or, you know, if they don’t, they’re morons. Hey, tell me, Allison, how come none of us used our freaky powers for fun hot sex times purposes? I feel like we missed an opportunity here.”

This is what she appreciates most about Klaus these days, sort of selfishly, she thinks as she steps over the sill of her window. He doesn’t need her to participate in any way to keep up a conversation. That, and he is the only one who is not bothering her about how she should quit smoking if she doesn’t want her throat to shiver up and die or whatever atrocity Pogo has been telling them. She will take not-so-discreet worried glances over flat out arguments any day.

She sits cross-legged on the ledge and taps the space in front of her like an invitation. They used to be so close, Klaus and her, when they were kids and she would let him borrow her skirts and they would do each other’s nails and complain about the other kids and gossip and discuss crushes and snuggle every time one of them were upset. Klaus was always a very physical person, with his hand gestures and ability to inhabit every room he was in, and he was so quick to hold hands or put his head on Allison’s lap before… Before.

Allison couldn’t pinpoint when the shift happened exactly, if Klaus changed too much or if they just grew apart or, most probably, both. Maybe it was when they were teenagers and she was struggling to get away from her family and he was struggling to get away, period. Nonetheless, being back with him now is easy as breathing.

Allison holds out her lighter and Klaus complies, lighting his cigarette then hers as she dangles it from her mouth and shields the flame from the breeze with her hand, fingers brushing against his in a comfortable touch. She never thought she would be that at ease with her siblings again, and yet here she is, Klaus’ thigh pressing against her knee as he rocks it slightly in the empty air, his entire body turning towards her in a touch-starved, hungry way she recognizes, because she used to see it in herself, sees it in most of her siblings, really. Even then he keeps blabbering on and on, and she only has to smile and chuckle and nod.

That is, until, halfway through her cigarette, she coughs a little and Klaus abruptly stops. She sends him a warning look, frown in place and begging him in her head not to start telling her about how much hurt her larynx could take. Instead, Klaus just looks at her with wide, blue eyes, so clear they seem to reflect the moonlight, incredibly vulnerable, and says: “Hey, sis. This is probably not my place at all to ask about, and I wish Luther was the one saying this, and you’re almost definitely going to storm out, which, trust me, I get that. But I was just thinking about your throat and your choosing nicotine over being responsible, yada yada yada,” he waves his hands nervously, almost burning a hole in his jeans without him noticing, “which sounds very out of character of you, and I thought maybe, and you can kick me if I’m wrong, really, but maybe you actually _want_ it to never heal again, don’t you?”

She can’t do anything but stare back at him.

Outside, the wind has stopped rustling leaves and whistling around the trunks of the garden trees, and the sky is almost devoid of stars except for the moon (and doesn’t it still feel weird now, being able to look at the moon and not _yearning,_ for the first time in years), and still his eyes glow in this weird greenish, bluish hue as the butt of his cigarette gleams copper and gold.

For once, Allison is speechless.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Klaus says, and when he chuckles, it’s mirthless. “Trust me, and I might sound like a broken record here but bear with me, I do get that.” She frowns in confusion. He smiles, self-depreciating. “Well, don’t gape at me like that, it’s not like I didn’t spent the last two decades getting pissed out of my mind so I didn’t have to deal with my shit either.”

Allison’s eyes widen and she mouthes, silently, _I forgot._ And she berates herself even as she does. Of course Klaus spent the past two decades drugged to forget about his powers - she knew that, she knew about it - and somehow it still didn’t feel so real to her, that maybe he got it, that maybe he got her, sort of, kind of.

The only persons in the world who could ever understand were all staying in this house, after all. People so powerful they were scared of themselves, Klaus and dear Ben and _Vanya._

She mouthes _I’m_ _sorry,_ but Klaus handwaves her apology away, and says it’s no biggie, and he changes the topic for the time it takes him to light another cigarette for himself.

(Allison, her throat raw and the telltale coppery taste of blood on her tongue, doesn’t, but she helps him light it this time, his hands too shaky to hold the lighter safely, the way they sometimes got. There is a bead of sweat on his brow and she wishes not the first time that she could _talk_ to him about it. She was in Hollywood - he isn’t the first addict in withdrawal she has frequented - surely there is something they all can do - but she can’t say it, so she doesn’t.)

He only brings it up again much later that evening, as he stand on the threshold of her room, and she prepares an excuse to tell Vanya to come over, possibly something about helping her read lines for a script in a movie she’ll never get to play in anyway. This time his face looks softer, not as weird and alien as in the moonlight, in the pinkish glow of her childhood lamppost.

“You know, it doesn’t work.” Klaus pauses. She makes a face of incomprehension. “Trying to avoid it. Trust me, I’ve tried - oh my god, did I try - all the possible ways, actually - and it doesn’t. Didn’t work out well for dear Vanya either. Or even Ben.”

He leaves after that with a hint of an impossibly sad smile that she is not used to seeing on his ever-expressive face, on his ever-changing mask of exaggerated pouts and smirks and frowns, always theatrical but never quite vulnerable either.

She catches his sleeve before he is completely out the door, and mouthes her thanks before she wraps her arms around his shoulders to pull him into a hug. The way he clutches at her like a kid makes her feel as pitying as she is comforted.

This is one of the good evenings. There are more and more of those these days.

 

Sometimes her mornings start with a crash and a bang and, of course, Vanya apologizing.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, groggy with fretful sleep and anxiety leftover from her nightmare.

Allison rolls her eyes at her goodnaturedly, but Vanya misses it, too busy crouching to pick up whatever fell when she bumped into Allison’s dressing table - in that case, a particularly expensive eyeshadow palette. Not like Allison is going to tell her about it: Vanya would freak out over having ruined it, then over Allison even owning something that costly to begin with, as if Allison couldn’t buy out Vanya’s apartment, violin, and closet without taking any money out of Claire’s college fund.

They are yet to touch any of their inheritance because a team of lawyers is still trying to decrypt their father’s will, which definitely sounds like something Reginald Hargreeves would do. Allison isn’t even sure they are to get any money, or at least not in any straightforward way - probably there will be a mess of conditions such as must save the world once every three years or must beat up at least three robbers a week or must stay alone on the moon for four years for mysterious apocalypse-related reasons no one cares to explain. Allison has come to understand from a young age that her father’s love came with a lot of conditions.

(She remembers being thirteen and smiling for the cameras like a pet doing a particularly brilliant trick. In many ways, not so different from stardom - she isn’t sure she ever learned any other way to be loved.)

“It’s alright,” she writes down for Vanya. “It was almost empty anyway.”

Vanya, still crouching, looks up at her with dubitative, raised eyebrows that Allison has only ever seen on Claire or in the mirror. “Oh, sure,” she says, waving at the powder-splattered carpet, “that definitely looks empty.”

Allison grabs her other notebook, the one prefilled with the sentences she uses every day: “Don’t be a smartass.”

“But then how would you know I have the trademark Hargreeves wit,” Vanya mumbles. She stands up and away from the powder anyway. “I’m getting a broom and a dustpan, I’ll be back in a few.”

Allison wants to tell her not to bother, but it’s not like she has time to write anything and call for Vanya’s attention in the time it takes for her to leave the room, so she ends up waving goodbye instead.

She forgets she can’t talk about a dozen times a day. It doesn’t get any fewer or far in between and it doesn’t get any easier. She doesn’t resent Vanya as much as Vanya resents herself, she really doesn’t, apart from the small part of her that inevitably does, and the karmic irony of it all doesn’t help as much as it could have.

A dozen times a day Alison shuts her eyes and makes herself remember all the wishes that came true and reminds herself that this is what she deserves. Bad people don’t get better.

 

“Your larynx is getting better every day,” Pogo says, not caring for the way iciness crawls up her spine and how is she getting better when it feels like a hand is squeezing her throat anyway?

At her right side, Luther beams up like a kid getting his Christmas present, and she can add that to the ever-longer list of reasons why she feels guilty. “It is? That’s- oh my god, Pogo, that’s amazing.”

“Yes, it is very much so,” Pogo confirms, his mouth smiling but his eyes stern as he adds: “Especially as it does so despite a complete lack of efforts in that direction from the involved party.”

Allison wants to argue otherwise, wants to tell him he is wrong and she has been trying very hard, takes her meds every day under Luther and Vanya’s heavy stares, wants to tell him he is wrong and her throat isn’t, couldn’t, get better. She doesn’t get to have this - to have her cake and eat it too.

But Luther keeps on smiling like the sun coming out of the cloud and asking all kinds of questions about medication, and how much time, and if Pogo really is sure her voice will never rise above a whisper again, and if there is any new surgery she should get, and she can see him planning for their future in his head, and her own is fuzzy and empty and noisy at the same time, like she isn’t even sitting in the room, like she is anywhere but here - ah yes, the great escape, a patented Allison Hargreeves way to deal with anything.

Here’s the thing though - she can’t. She can’t deal with this. Or sit in Pogo’s cramped, doctor-like office with all the metal scraps forming the threatening shapes of new inventions and the picture of them all that he got from their father, the picture of little Vanya added to the side, staring at her and not smiling because she never did. And tiny, childish Allison with her grin and pride and foolishness. And her reflection in the cracked glass.

Her fucking reflection, reminding her of how she used to spend hours in front of the mirror and now it’s like she can barely look at her own face. It doesn’t feel like hers and it doesn’t feel right and it feels like a mask and she can’t put words on it - literally can’t when her tongue is cut like this - but she never knew guilt could be like this.

Pogo is still hanging mid-sentence. She gets up and leave.

 

Allison knows Luther all too well and he knows her just as well (she remembers telling him in what feels like a past life _I feel like you’re the only one who ever saw me,_ except maybe it never happened, maybe she just thought about it so loudly she hoped he would pick up on it, the way all silly girls do) and knows where he will come looking for her because it’s obvious and where he will come looking for her because it is not. She chooses neither.

She tries to pick the most random, un-Allison place she could think of and ends up in her car driving around the city. It doesn’t make her feel better the way she hoped it would. It doesn’t make her feel much of anything, to be honest.

 

When she comes back, the sun is setting and Diego is sitting on the porch, with a frown and his full costume and his hands idly playing with a knife. He is pretty much the last person she expected to see here, and there is a pang of dull surprise in her mind: they never talked much, even back when they were younger and he thought she was almost as bad as Luther. And sometimes she can’t remember why she never tried harder, then he smiles with vitriol on his teeth and says something snappy about the prodigal son returning - because of course he would - and she starts to walk by his side without stopping.

“They’re all outside looking for you, you know,” he calls out. “Even Vanya. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t been out of the mansion on her own for over a month now. So at least you made that happen. Congratu-fucking-lations to you.”

Like everything that goes unsaid and rotten and bitter in this house, Diego is the one who would burst her bubble. She doesn’t know why she expected any less.

“I’ll apologize to her when she gets back,” she writes down painstakingly. She has to crouch to pass him the note because he is not even trying to look up from where he is glaring stubbornly at the back of their yard.

(Pogo told her she could start with a whisper maybe now, told her told her told her, and she refuses.)

“Yeah, ‘cause that makes everything better.”

She pauses. She wants to get back inside and sleep for a hundred years or so, but-

“Why are you still here?” she writes.

“Figured you’d have to come back eventually. Luther will be so fucking mad when he realizes I was right.” She smiles humorlessly. “You know you don’t get to do that. Go off and leave everyone worried sick and then come back and act all self-punishing and,” he waves his knife around, and his voice comes to life, biting and snarling, “make it all about you, like you always do.”

She raises her eyebrows because, actually, this is kind of about her, and she has enough reasons to feel guilty and self-punishing for a lifetime, which is, in fact, what she plans on doing.

“What else am I supposed to do,” she writes, putting more force on her pencil than she intended to, pen scritching and going right through the paper but her lines trembling a little too much, “go get into a fight with strangers, like you do? Because that seems to solve everything,” and she is at the bottom of the page and she oh-so-terribly wants to keep writing something mean, something ugly, about where it got him and about where it got his girlfriend, but before she has the time to sink to new levels of awfulness, Diego scoffs at her notebook.

“How long are you going to keep this up, by the way?” he says. “How long before you finally tell Vanya you know how to sign and she stops feeling guilty about your own messed up issues? You do know your wallowing doesn’t just affect you, right?” He looks up then and there must be something in her face - something pale and shocked and broken - because he adds: “Yeah, I’ve seen you in front of the mirror.”

She thinks of pointing out that he shouldn’t be sneaking up on his siblings, that he shouldn’t be spying on them, because she is angry and she wants to yell at someone about something at least, someone who isn’t her for once, but in the end she just slams her notebook next to him.

Cold wind bites her cheeks, red with anger, and chaps her lips, and before she finishes pivoting on her high heels and slamming the door he tells her: “That’s exactly what you should do.”

Allison doesn’t understand at first - and then, _what else am I supposed to do, go get into a fight with strangers, like you do?_ \- and she ignores him and rushes up the steps to her room.

She gets out of it less than half an hour later at the sound of a car thrumming awake with her game face on and only needs to tilt her head at Diego, who is halfway out of the yard already, before he smirks and opens the passenger door for her with an _after you, princess._

“Alright,” she whispers, and her voice croaks and cracks around the edges. “Let’s go then.”

 

That night her siblings are still up when they go home bloody and exhausted and Allison feels like for the first time in a long time she has let herself be broken. She comes home to Luther pacing around the living room like a caged lion and stopping short in his tracks to gaze at her so intensely she can’t bring herself to look back at him, and to Klaus lazily clapping from the couch as if she didn’t hear him muttering _please please tell me you guys see her too_ in the split second it took for Diego to clear his throat, and to Five with his fists clenched and a furious frown and half a dozen empty cups of coffee in front of him on the table, and to Vanya standing very still before she rushes towards Alison and wraps her arms around her.

Allison doesn’t think she has ever seen Vanya make the first move before, but she sinks into the embrace al the same.

“You’re such an asshole,” Vanya grumbles into Allison’s collarbone.

“Yeah, already went over that part with her,” Diego shrugs, ever-so-helpful.

This time, when Allison’s lips part against her sister’s hair around the familiar words, the magic words, _you’re alright,_ Vanya can hear her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shakshuka is a Mediterranean/North African dish that my mother makes a lot for some obscure reason and it’s awesome!! it’s got everything like, poached eggs, tomatoes, peppers, GARLIC. all that good stuff
> 
> also for the easter (ha!) eggs:  
> drive-by chronicles: sidewayz is a real movie that david castañeda ACTUALLY played in and it is very important to me that you all know that
> 
> also tom hopper ACTUALLY played a role in I feel pretty
> 
> kinda wanted to add ellen page’s _i downloaded a ghost_ reference but mocking her earlier cinematography is too much like shooting on an ambulance and like… she is currently voicing a character in a kids’ movie called _robodog_ … and three years ago she voiced one in a swiss-french movie called _my life as a zucchini_ … so much humoristic content so little time… 
> 
> anyway my tumblr moved to vanya-hargreeves-apologist where i thirst over vanya, join me!
> 
> kudos and comments are always appreciated like seriously they give me motivation to write and give me a lot of emotions and comfort (and avengers: endgame is getting close so trust me i'll be emotionally compromised as fuck!! how excited are you all about seeing it?)


End file.
